I'm making every effort to gather some thoughts now that the caffeine had settled in. Who would bother to waste precious time (this late night) with such frivolous act of forecasting? Me. And this is nothing new, except that the last time I bother to predict the Golden Globes Awards was three years ago. Now then...
HFPA 71st Golden Globe Awards Predictions: Best Motion Picture (Drama): “Gravity” Best Motion Picture (Comedy/Musical): “American Hustle” Best Director: Alfonso Cuarón, “Gravity” Best Actor (Drama): Chiwetel Ejiofor, “12 Years A Slave” Best Actor (Comedy/Musical): Bruce Dern, “Nebraska” Best Actress (Drama): Cate Blanchett, “Blue Jasmine” Best Actress (Comedy/Musical): Amy Adams, “American Hustle” Best Supporting Actor: Jared Leto, “Dallas Buyers Club” Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Lawrence, “American Hustle” Best Screenplay: John Ridley, “12 Years A Slave” Best Music (Score): Steven Price, “Gravity” Best Music (Song): “Let It Go” ~ “Frozen” Best Foreign Language Film: “Blue Is The Warmest Color” Best Animated Feature Film: “Frozen”
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The Winners (Live Telecast Update): Best Motion Picture (Drama): “12 Years A Slave” Best Motion Picture (Comedy/Musical):“American Hustle” Best Director:Alfonso Cuarón, “Gravity” Best Actor (Drama): Matthew McConaughey, “Dallas Buyers Club” Best Actor (Comedy/Musical): Leonardo DiCaprio, "Wolf of Wall Street" Best Actress (Drama): Cate Blanchett, “Blue Jasmine” Best Actress (Comedy/Musical): Amy Adams, “American Hustle” Best Supporting Actor: Jared Leto, “Dallas Buyers Club” Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Lawrence, “American Hustle” Best Screenplay: Spike Jonze, “Her” Best Music (Score): Alex Ebert, “All is Lost” Best Music (Song): “Ordinary Love”~ “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom” Best Animated Feature Film: “Frozen” Best Foreign Language Film: “The Great Beauty”
Made grave mistakes by changing Matthew McConaughey's and 12 Years A Slave's predictions. That's half right, and half wrong. Tough call.
This entry would be the hardest to write even whilst listening to the winsome 'Elegy for Dunkirk' from Atonement by Dario Marianelli. I assumed, as I often does, that I have long abandon the thoughts of penning what I feel or think; a purposeful task, I believe, rightfully dedicated to the foolishly young or the wisely experienced, only to be carried out when said person is filled with energy and inspiration, and of course, lavished with time.
I could take some time off to ramble on the crazies or mundanes, perhaps giving some attention to the backdated fancies for the digital canvas, many of which are now cryptical images and sounds that lack a tonal centre siphoned out from the memorial tubes. What matters most is that I am back to that proverbial square one. There I was trying hard to put a sturdy footing on solid grounds without any sense of trepidation, trying to predict my next move, even trying to reach those illusive goals. Then just like that, 2014 rushes in like a gust of north wind ready to make a mockery out of my reserved existence.
I make no sound.
2013 shall be archived with both tears and smiles. Take some, rejects some. Lost love, found love. Broken hearts and wild hearts, all the stories conjoining to form life's greatest fucked-up and memorable episodes. I wish not to make journals of everything, indeed some of which have to be omitted gradually. Memories must stay as memories, because backward glances to the past might ruin your chance for a brighter future.
Oh, but who's to say?
On the work front, every job last year gets done, but definitely without hiccups. Winning two unnecessary awards for two print campaigns were enough to prove that people still need to justify their hard works with accolades. Can't we just be happy at what we do? Otherwise, kudos to the creative team for this.
I need a bigger space to eulogize my fantasies.
And if all that came before were puny achievements, then spending about 536 hours on watching films might just be my greatest accomplishment thus far. "Haha" as you may, but I could not hold back my addictions. I must always escape reality through the celluloids. It has oft-times been proven, again and again, that happiness is doing things for no significant reasons, and if what you do makes you feel good, then it probably (almost certainly) must be right.
So for the record, that's 536.3 hours and 323 films (inclusive of re-watches) in total.
I need to take stock and reassess my life's direction --- immediately! Here's the bigger picture:
Together with Avatar and Life of Pi, Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity completes the "spectacle trinity". I find myself declaring Gravity as the towering achievement in filmmaking to everyone who (for the lack of a stronger word) wholeheartedly condemns it. It wouldn't be an overstatement when I pointed out that Gravity is a love-letter to acute storytelling, a litmus test of things to come, an innovative technological wonderment that must be marked of note in the cinematic history. It is one of the few films that use computer wizardry (plus good old-fashioned acting) to propel its narratives, even when the storyline was stripped bare to the essence. With subtle concept of rebirth concealed within an action / adventure plot, Gravity soars.
And that performance by Sandra Bullock - what words might fail to express.
Docking back to reality, here's hoping that 2014 would be overflowed with many good things. Some moments had to be reminded, some things repaired. Others, waiting to be redeemed.
Life, to some degree, is a never-ending atonement. Only a winsome song in elegiac metre plays on….
More on film reviews, life's happenstances and every other stuffs in between when 2014 settles in.
