Monday, June 1, 2009

The 2009 MTV Movie Awards

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Now playing: Eminem - We Made You

This show was fantastic. In a way that no MTV awards show has been fantastic in a very long time. For real, the MTV Awards shows have sucked it up the past few years, both the music awards and the movie awards. But this Movie awards show was fabulous. Some highlights (spoilers if you haven't seen it yet - DVR and all that):

ANDY SAMBERG, Andy Samberg, and Andy Samberg. Holy cow, he is hi-LAR-ious! I was a fan before, but he was just such a fun and refreshing host, I have become an even bigger fan in the past 2 hours. Love him. From the intro movie montage sequence right through the very ending, he rocked. I guess it should be mentioned here that the montage of SNL digital shorts was fabulous. And all of the making fun of Twilight was great too. I understand that he was not the sole vision behind writing this show, but only a part of it, however - the whole production was great, and had a distinctly SNL feel to it, and I have to think that he had a lot to do with it. Anyway, I think Andy Samberg alone is the reason this show was better than the last few years worth of Movie and Music awards, and I applaud him for that. Go Andy!

(And while I'm on that topic - SNL is great again. There have been only two periods of SNL that have ever interested me enough to watch before, and I wasn't even really around for the first one. You know, the John Belushi/Steve Martin era? I was born in '79 folks, I missed that the first time around - but syndication is a beautiful thing, and I celebrate that period of SNL wholeheartedly. The other was the Adam Sandler/Chris Farley era in the late 90's and early 00's. You know you loved it. And again now - Andy Samberg, Seth Meyers, and company have brought SNL back to life, IMO. Give it a try, if you haven't already)

Anyway, SACHA BARON COHEN and EMINEM?!?!?! I think it was all staged - Borat was meant to fall on Em from the second he strapped into that harness, but Em knew nothing about it as far as I could see. He was downright pissed and it was great. I can only hope that Eminem will have an epiphany (One-Minute Writing prompt word from last week - it has showed up in my day-to-day conversation for days!) along the lines of Kanye after the gay fish thing on South Park. We can only hope.

But Eminem's performance was awesome. I haven't really been into him lately, which is maybe evidenced by my reference to him needing a Kanye-style intervention, but I love this new song. I bought the album tonight as I was watching the show. Reviews to follow in a later post.

BEN STILLER!!!! I'm such a Ben Stiller fan, going back God-only-knows how long, and the whole montage of his work was an awesome reminder of how wonderful he truly is. He didn't look great, and the intro to his big award (Zac Efron and Keifer Sutherland) was obnoxious, but DAMN are his movies funny. I adored the montage of his work and watched it more than once.

KINGS OF LEON were fabulous, as they always are. I think I'm going to go see them this summer. I wanted to before, just because I like them, but I've never seen a "live" performance on TV (does that make sense, "live" on TV? I think the quotes make it work), and I thought they were even better live (which potentially says a lot in the age of Auto-Tune. Or do they use Auto-Tune on awards shows too?). Their performance was similar to hearing their CD, honestly, but I don't know - their sound is just so, so interesting; complex and layered, and they reproduce that sound so completely and excellently on stage, it's fabulous. I love them. And the golfing commercial? Great.

LASER CATS! Okay, they weren't laser cats, they was more like Mr. Bigglesworth, but it SHOULD have been a Laser Cats skit. That was one thing missing from this show - Will Ferrell in a Laser Cats skit would have been perfect. Keyboard cat was not even a close second.

THE ONE EPIC FAIL of the night, however, was the "Congrats to this year's best villain, Heath Ledger" afterthought. Are you serious? I mean it's one thing that he died before the film even came out, but you're going to put so much of this awards show into effing Twilight and then barely acknowledge how brilliant Heath Ledger's portrayal of The Joker was? That, my friends, was a travesty. I almost missed it when I went to ffwd the DVR. I hope that everyone I know has seen The Dark Knight. It was fantastic, and Heath Ledger stole the effing show.

At the end: I'm a fan of Denzel Washington, I really am. He's a class act and an excellent actor.

Don't get me wrong - most of the actual awards were all wrong, it's the production and the show that I truly enjoyed. As much as I'm a Twilight fan, it should NOT have won all of the awards that it did. I voted for the awards this year (GREAT procrastination material, FYI), and I'm not sure I voted for Twilight for a single one. I'm a fan, but I fully acknowledge that the film was JUST NOT THAT GOOD. I don't think it was nominated for a single Oscar, and there's a very good reason for that. Guess what it is. Ugh, even I was sick and tired of Twilight after an hour. But that aside, I thought the show was great, and I encourage MTV to stick with this fabulous formula on a going forward basis. Or at least hire Andy Samberg as lead writer for all awards shows in the future.

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