MovieZen Blog

MTV Movie Awards: The "Other" Movie Awards Show

Sunday night, the "other" movie award show airs, and I'm pretty excited about it. I look forward to the MTV Movie Awards mainly because these are the movies I actually pay to go see, not the ones I finally decide to see because someone decided to give it a bunch of Oscars.

You know right off the bat that you're in store for something different, just with the host ... Mike Myers. I'm sure this means we'll be treated with lots of clips of the upcoming The Love Guru, but I'm good with that. Again, that looks like something I'd actually go see, and in fact I plan to. Any chance to see more clips from it is fine with me.

The categories include similar ones to the Academy Awards and also some that are very unique to the the MTV Movie Awards. Up for Best Male Performance:
Michael Cera for Juno
Matt Damon for The Bourne Ultimatum
Shia LaBeouf for Transformers
Will Smith for I Am Legend
Denzel Washington for American Gangster
If it was me choosing the awards, which it is in some ways, as these are decided by the moviegoers themselves, I'd go with Will Smith, and with this crowd, he's usually a safe bet.

Up for Best Female Performance:
Amy Adams for Enchanted
Jessica Biel of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry
Katherine Heigl for Knocked Up
Keira Knightley for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Ellen Page for Juno
I have to go with Ellen Page. In fact, I was rooting for her to win the Best Actress Oscar. If not her, though, it would have to be Katherine Heigl, which is pretty funny considering they're both dealing with unwanted pregnancies in their films.

Here's a category that's great and should be a given, as it's what many of us look for in a film, Best Comedic Performance. Nominated are:
Amy Adams for Enchanted
Johnny Depp for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Jonah Hill for Superbad
Seth Rogen for Knocked Up
Adam Sandler for I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry
Normally Sandler is a given in this category any time he's nominated. But I'm not sure if maybe Jonah Hill or Seth Rogen might steal it away from him this year.

When we're not looking for funny, we're looking for excitement, so Best Fight is a good category as well. Nominated are:
Alien vs. Predator in Alien vs Predator - Requiem
Hayden Christensen vs. Jamie Bell in Jumper
Matt Damon vs. Joey Ansah in The Bourne Ultimatum
Sean Faris vs. Cam Gigandet in Never Back Down
Tobey Maguire vs. James Franco in Spider-Man 3
Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan vs. Sun Ming Ming in Rush Hour 3
As for the winner, I'm not sure who I'd go with, except one of the two films out with its third sequel. My personal choice as a martial artist has to be to go with Jackie Chan, because nobody fights like him.

Breakthrough Performance should be a category in any awards show. It's just nice to recognize those newbies. Nominated are:
Nikki Blonski for Hairspray
Chris Brown for This Christmas
Michael Cera in Superbad (wouldn't this be negated since he already put another film out with Juno and isn't a newbie?)
Zac Efron in Hairspray (how can you consider this breakthrough when he already has two major grossing High School Musical films?)
Megan Fox for Transformers
Jonah Hill for Superbad
Christopher Mintz-Plasse for Superbad
Seth Rogen for Knocked Up
How can you not give this to Seth Rogen?

And of course, another favorite category that we only get with the MTV Movie Awards, Best Villain. Nominated are:
Javier Bardem for No Country For Old Men
Johnny Depp for Sweeney Todd
Topher Grace for Spider-Man 3
Angelina Jolie for Beowulf
Denzel Washington for American Gangster
I can't even consider anything that has to do with Beowulf after it nearly put me to sleep reading it in my senior year of high school. I think there's a very good chance it could go to Topher Grace, as while he was a real sweet-faced kid on That 70s Show, he was downright nasty in Spider-Man 3.

The category of Best Kiss always make me giggle, mostly because they don't always include strictly romantic kisses, and are usually pretty humorous, yet this time, they're sticking with the romance. Nominated are:
Amy Adams and Patrick Dempsey in Enchanted
Briana Evigan and Robert Hoffman in Step Up 2 the Streets
Shia LaBeouf and Sarah Roemer in Disturbia
Ellen Page and Michael Cera in Juno
Daniel Radcliffe and Katie Leung in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
My personal preference will always be to go with Juno, no matter what it was nominated for, but I think as much as Harry Potter fans were talking about this kiss before it even happened, I think they'll take the win.

Lastly, this leaves us with Best Picture. I can guarantee it won't be the same as the Oscar's choice, No Country For Old Men. In fact the Oscars only share one Best Picture nominee with this list, Juno, and that's why I think it's going to win the big award of the night, other than the fact it's also my personal choice as the best movie of the year. The other nominees are:
I Am Legend, National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Superbad
Transformers
I'm actually a little shocked that Knocked Up isn't on this list.

Among the other things you can look for during the awards, broadcast on MTV on Sunday night, is just a much more relaxed atmosphere than you see at the Oscar telecast. People aren't in fancy gowns and tuxes, they're in ripped jeans and short skirts. Instead of taking home a golden statue of a guy named Oscar, they're taking home a golden bucket of popcorn.  When you think about it, that's what movies are, just sitting back and relaxing, and enjoying your time.

LauraBelle
Troubled Hollywood

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Where is Harry Potter headed in the next films?

You know the drill, anytime you hear the melodious bell music you know the film. It has become a staple to the inner geek. Harry Potter made it cool to like magic.

Now that the Deathly Hallows became the last book of the series what's left? Three movies to go if Hollywood has their way.  But considering how jaded Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and company look, the magic might have been let out of the bottle a bit.

Harry Potter has grown up. Let's face it. Most of the kids who grew up reading him are now young adults, so it is natural that Harry will be headed in a far more darker direction. It's safe to say that the film now in production Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, will have a more complex storyline.

That said, one never knows because they do leave out a lot in the films. (How they gyped us of the chance to see Lily Potter and James as young teens torturing young "Snivellus" is beyond me, and sort of put them in a corner for the next two films as this particular scene is very important for the series.)

Personally, I think they should begin to concentrate less on the magic and more on the intricate characters. The Hallows themselves will be amazing, and watching Voldemort's backstory will be pretty challenging.

The sixth book in many ways lends itself a bit more to cinema than the previous incarnations. I believe the best overall was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban as it really captured human emotion. Lots of the films get too caught up in the school, the magic and the overall world. They forget that at this point these things are entirely normal.

Maryam DiMauro
Filmsi

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5 Reasons Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Shouldn't Be Split into Two Films

Last month, Warner Bros. triumphantly announced that they would be splitting Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – the seventh and final book of the landmark series – into two films in order to "do the book, and its many fans, justice."  Fervent fans, still ticked off that previous Harry Potter films have cut subplots and characters, rejoiced at the news: more Harry Potter to look forward to!  Yay!

But they're wrong.  This is a terrible idea, and I beg Steve Kloves – who's dutifully writing Part 1 of Deathly Hallows as we speak – to see reason and stand up to the studio.  What follows are just a few reasons why this is a really bad idea.  And in case there are any doubts to my motives, I'm a big Potter fan myself.

5. It's the most painfully obvious money-making scheme ever.

This one is such a no-brainer it almost doesn't need to be on the list: Warner Bros. is not splitting up the films as a commitment to artistic integrity.  They're doing it because Harry Potter is a license to print money.  Worldwide, Harry Potter is already the highest-grossing film franchise in history, beating the sum of the six Star Wars films and the sum of the twenty-one James Bond films; apparently unsatisfied with merely being the best, they now have three more films to add to that total.

4. The actors will get even older.

By itself, this doesn't bother me that much – on pretty much every movie and TV show with high school kids, the actors are all 25 or older, so having a 22-year-old Daniel Radcliffe playing a 17-year-old Harry Potter won't be too troublesome.  What will be annoying are all the idiotic reporters who don't realize this, and now have three more years to pester Radcliffe and company about how old they are.

3. They're destroying the book's arc in favor of cramming everything in.

Actually two related points here.  The first: cramming everything in is good, right?  We love all the minor characters and details!  Right? No.  There are books, and then there are movies.  If you literally translated a 700-page novel to the screen, it would be the most boring thing ever.  The goal is not to fit as much in as possible, but to keep the spine of the story and make it an exciting film. The second: when you do the adaptation, you have to make a movie work on its own terms.  A movie only using the plot of the first half of a book usually won't work.  Case in point: what will the climax of Part 1 be?  There is no built-in climax in the book!  J.K. Rowling saves that for the end, remember?  This is an extreme example, but it's like slicing the Mona Lisa in half, enlarging each half so they're as big as the original painting was, and selling them each as complete works of art.

2. It won't look pretty on my DVD shelf.

I'm a fan of the Saturday Night Live "Best Of" compilations, and I own quite a few of them on DVD.  They're all lined up nicely in a row, but standing out like a sore thumb is the Will Ferrell edition – because unlike the rest of them, he has two different "volumes."  The same aesthetic travesty will now beset the Harry Potter series.  (Okay...so I'm sometimes laughably obsessive-compulsive.)

1. The First Half of Deathly Hallows Drags Anyway.

The dirty little secret about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is that the first half of the book isn't that wonderful to begin with. It's easy to forget this, because the last two hundred pages are some of the most entertaining and memorable prose I've ever read – and I really mean that.  But the first half, after a promising start, soon settles into an eternity of "hiding in the woods" sequences that seem to exist only to make the book take place over one year (in order to fit the format of the other books.)  An eternity, let me again remind you, that has no climax.

And I haven't even gotten to the point that the first half of the book has no Hogwarts scenes.  None.  That's part of what makes the climax of the book so spectacular – we finally return to familiar territory for the mother of all showdowns.  As it stands, the first Deathly Hallows films will be all set up with no payoff, while the second half will be all payoff with no setup.  You have to have the films work individually.  But why care about that when you can make money?

Michael Dance
StrandedinManhattan.com

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