The President’s popularity soars. His ambitious legislative agenda seems inevitable. His party is united behind him while his opposition is disorganized and ineffectual.

Then things change.

The opposition gets its act together, rallying around issues that have little to do with the legislation in question.  Those attacks and a sense of inaction drive the President’s approval ratings way down. It’s an election year, so members of his own party start pulling away, refusing to support the President’s agenda for fear of riding a sinking ship into election day.

Sound familiar? It’s the plot of both 2010’s cable news channels and of the 1995 film The American President.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

A man is on track to succeed in his career through natural talent and hard work. However, he’s also in love with a young woman. Circumstances force him to choose between his career and the woman he loves. In the end, despite uncertainty and pressure, he chooses the woman. The two of them stare fondly as the credits roll.

Which movie did I just describe? Good Will Hunting? The Family Man? Regarding Henry? If we reverse the genders, we can add Sweet Home Alabama, The Devil Wears Prada, You’ve Got Mail and a dozen others to the list. You saw it in Felicity and you saw it on Friends. You see it every time you turn on the television.

But you don’t see it in real life.

Love.

I own a copy of this poster, framed, and signed by Kirs Kristofferson, Ernest Borgnine, and C.W. McCall. I am very proud of this.

On my bookshelf, there’s an old VHS tape with a faded, hand-written label. It says, “Convoy, 1st Gen.” This is because in 2000, when I tracked down and rented a copy of the 1978 Sam Peckinpah movie, after years of searching, I was so excited that I made two copies of it. Then I made another six copies off of those two copies, and gave them away to friends. (I am blessed with the sort of friends for whom a bootleg copy of Convoy is a great gift.) Anyway, the “1st Gen” on the copy I’m looking at indicates that this one was dubbed right from the original. I’ve lugged it from apartment to apartment over the last ten years, even though I haven’t always had access to a VCR.

But I probably won’t ever watch it again. If I wanted to see Convoy now (and I kind of do, after writing the last paragraph), I could just put it on the top of my Netflix queue. They’d send me a nice new DVD that would look ten times better than my old videotape. Actually, I don’t even have to wait for the DVD. Convoy is currently a “Watch It Now” movie on Netflix, so I can stream it right to my computer. Or I can use my XBox to watch it on my TV. And if I wanted to buy it, the DVD is $13 via Amazon.

This is simultaneously awesome, and a teeny bit sad.

It’s easy to forget that only 15 years ago, finding a movie was a very different experience.

I thought about trying to parse the subtext of Jeff Bridges’ rambling Oscar acceptance speech (spoiler alert: he’s channeling The Dude in a seriously uncanny way), but to no one’s surprise, I decided to try a slightly more…quantitative method.

Behold, the 2010 Oscar Acceptance Speech Word Cloud:

(Click for a larger version)

Statistical insights, after the jump:

The celebrities! The glamour! The inexplicable robot dance to the soundtrack of UP! Since everyone loves Monday morning quarterbacking, we’re giving you an opportunity to share your approval, gripes, jokes, and opinions here, in a special 2010 Oscars Open Thread.

Question 1: The night’s clear winners were Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker, a perfectly creditable film by any standard, but essentially a glorified buddy-cop picture. Did the winningest picture of the night deserve all the accolades heaped upon it—writing, directing, and best picture? How do you think it managed to beat out Avatar for all of those?

Deposed

Question 2: If there was a loser, it was James Cameron. Though Avatar picked up a few little men, none of them went to Cameron, and they were for technical categories—visual effects and cinematography—nothing to do with storytelling and artistic achievement. Did Avatar get what it deserved? Or was it robbed?

Question 3: In the Streeps/Bullock stakes, the victor was Sandra Bullock. Hope you won your Oscar pool with that one. What, exactly, do you think was being honored here? The actress? This particular performance? The longevity and diversity of her career? (By all of those measures, doesn’t Streep have the edge?). Hey, we’re not snobbish—as listeners to our podcast know well, at OTI we are a fan of actors who work. We just wonder if this Oscar was really for Demolition Man.

Bonus Questions for Overthinking

• What did you think of Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin as hosts?
• This year’s ceremony largely moved along at a brisk—sometimes even a breakneck—clip. Did it lack in character what it gained in speed? Or were you happy that they kept it to a relatively zippy three and a half hours?
• Seriously, what was up with that robot dance to the soundtrack of UP!?
• By what stretch of the imagination is Twilight a horror film? And what was that montage doing there in the first place?

Nothing Oscar-related is off limites, for it is your… Open Thread!

(The following post should be read in conjunction with Shana Mlawski’s oft-linked article, “Why Strong Female Characters Are Bad For Women.”)

If you’ve had any access to online or conventional media in the continental U.S. for the past 60 days, you’ve seen an ad for the upcoming bro movie She’s Out Of My League:

On the surface, a forgettable sex comedy. Adorable schlub lands major-league hottie; usual series of pratfalls and embarrassing incidents; he rises to the occasion and proves himself worthy of her love. No bankable stars and plenty of references (the TSA, iPhones) that will hopefully seem dated in ten years. The tone’s a little more crass than usual, but no worse than anything we’d see in the Eighties. Or Nineties. Or Aughts.

Of course, I liked it much better the first time I saw it, when it was called (500) Days of Summer.

"Buddy cop blocking"

Mild spoilers for The Hurt Locker will follow. Although if you haven’t seen it and aren’t planning on seeing it tomorrow, I’m not going to give away anything that will ruin it, and I might help you understand what all the fuss is about.

Is this familiar to anybody?

Sergeant [JT Sanborn] is an [aspiring] family man and sensible veteran [soldier] just trying to make it through the day unscathed. [Staff] Sergeant [William James] is a suicidal loose cannon [bomb defusing specialist] who doesn’t care if he even lives to see the end of the day. Reluctantly thrown together to solve the mysterious [bombing of a street in Iraq], the unlikely duo [encounters] a dangerous ring of [Iraqi insurgents] employing ex-military mercenaries. After a tragic turn of events, the mission becomes personal and the mismatched investigators must learn to trust one another as they wage a two-man war against [ennui, meaningless death and the inhumanity of neocolonial geopolitics].

Oh, I know where I saw this! It was drawn from an IMDB Plot Summary:

Sergeant Roger Murtaugh is an aging family man and sensible veteran police officer just trying to make it through the day unscathed. Sergeant Martin Riggs is a suicidal loose cannon cop who doesn’t care if he even lives to see the end of the day. Reluctantly thrown together to solve the mysterious murder of a banker’s daughter, the unlikely duo uncovers a dangerous ring of drug smugglers employing ex-military mercenaries. After a tragic turn of events, the mission becomes personal and the mismatched investigators must learn to trust one another as they wage a two-man war against a deadly criminal organization.

Look familiar? Unless you’re one of OTI’s valued younger readership, it should. It’s from 1987’s Lethal Weapon, perhaps the definitive “buddy cop” movie of the last forty years, made back when Mel Gibson was the sexiest man alive.

Yeah, the world has turned upside down several times since then. I hear there’s an iPhone app that can measure the rotational velocity. But one thing has held constant – the buddy cop movie is still close to all our hearts. Oh, except now they give it Academy Awards (or maybe they will – check out the Oscars next weekend).

How far does the similarity between The Hurt Locker and Lethal Weapon go? (Farther than you think) What are the differences? And what does this say about how we’ve changed as people since the salad days of Riggs and Murtaugh? Read on…

Every Winter Olympics, I do two things:

1. Marvel anew at the existence of ice dancing.
2. Watch the 1993 Disney comedy Cool Runnings.

The movie stars John Candy, testing our suspension of disbelief as a former Olympic athlete. He has a theory that world-class sprinters are really just underdressed world-class bobsledders. And when three of Jamaica’s fastest are tripped up trying to qualify for the Summer games, Candy gets to put his theory to the test. As he explains to one of his old teammates:

Listen, three of these guys can run the hundred in under ten-flat. I don’t care who you are, that’s lightning!

But what Irv fails to mention is that the fourth team member, Sanka Coffie, runs the hundred in about fifteen.

You’ve probably heard the news by now that hedge fund Pacificor, LLC has purchased the rights to the Terminator franchise from Halcyon’s bankruptcy auction. This transaction has sparked massive speculation on the franchise’s future. Will McG make more sequels? Will T1 and T2 screenwriter Will Wisher’s treatments turn into the next two sequels? Will Pacificor go for a total reboot?

The future not set: there is no fate but what this shady hedge fund makes, right? Well, I wasn’t content with that. As a rabid Terminator fanboy, I needed to know how this turns out, so I took the liberty of using the Overthinking It Time Displacement Field (OTITDF) to travel ten years into the future to see what will become of our beloved franchise.

My report is as follows. Be warned; it ain’t pretty.

2012-2014: The Sequels

Pacificor’s first move was to get a sequel to Terminator: Salvation out the door as quickly as possible. McG, not having anything else better to do, agreed to helm the sequel. Christian Bale, upon hearing that McG had brought on the same Director of Photography from the last movie, refused to participate.

McG, in a bind, recalled Freddie Prinze, Jr’s fine work in Wing Commander and tapped him for the role of John Connor. Nicolas Cage just showed up on set, and nobody had the heart to tell him he wasn’t actually in the movie.

Pacificor, for its part, contributed the title:

A couple weeks ago, I discussed the twisted subtext of Cartoon Network’s Clone Wars. But there’s another, even darker aspect of the series: the way George Lucas is pushing it at the expense of the original Star Wars movies. Like all Sith plots, this one is hard to see, even as it unfolds in plain sight.

Last summer, my son informed me that he wanted to have a Star Wars: A New Hope party for his fourth birthday. This was among the proudest moments of my life. Definitely prouder than the day he was born. (Think about it: everyone gets born. Not everyone appreciates Star Wars before he turns four.)

Nope.

So it was with great relish that I went online to buy a full spectrum of party stuff from a galaxy far, far away. I wanted plates that looked like Death Stars, cups that each showed a different member of Red Squardron (I was gonna keep Wedge for myself), and a tablecloth that reproduced that original poster where Luke’s shirt is open.

What I found was page after page of Clone Wars stuff. Nothing that showed Luke, Han, or Leia. There was a lot of Vader, but I’m sure it was because he was in Episode III. Yoda was only depicted holding a lightsaber—his Clone Wars incarnation. There are 42 items listed in EZ Party Zone’s Clone Wars category. In the “Star Wars” category, there are only four items, all of which are Vader-related. I scoured the internet, and I couldn’t find a single kids’ birthday party item that was definitively original trilogy. This was a problem for me, because I am carefully shielding my child from all knowledge of the prequel trilogy for as long as I can. If he finds out Santa isn’t real, that’s alright. The day he hears about Jar-Jar, I’m going to cry.