The Golden Globes event is bought and paid for and really doesn’t reflect any kind of peer reflection on a category – it’s mostly about the HFPA deciding who they’d most like to give awards to. Having said that it is a fun ceremony to watch and quite a bit more laid back than the Oscars. Seth Meyers did a great job as emcee but it amuses me to see how he (and others as host) effectively disappear from the show after the opening. I seem to remember Ricky Gervais being much more present, but maybe it was a conscious choice by the producers to get the host outta there. The choice to award so much to 3 Billboards Outside Ebbings, Missouri is a strange one. For the most part, it gets very divisive reviews and especially in comparison to others in its category, just doesn’t seem like the best movie. I was bummed that Kyle MacLachlan didn’t win for Twin Peaks: The Return but it’s not surprising… and again, his win or loss really isn’t a knock on him. It’s on whether the HFPA liked him. One thing I did really like is Oprah’s Opening Bid for the 2020 Presidency. Guess we’ll have to stay tuned on that, eh?
This weekend, Larry & I saw a couple movies that were pretty great. Yesterday, we saw:
What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
It’s a movie from a few years back and we watched it on Amazon’s service, and holy hell, it’s amazing. It’s directed by Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords as well as Taiki Waititi, who made the most recent Thor, Thor: Ragnarok. With that background just know that yes, this movie is hilarious but also does a great job of treating the subject matter fairly…with that subject matter being real vampires, werewolves, and others. Set in current times and taking place in New Zealand, the movie is staged like a documentary that follows around 4 vampires who’ve lived together a LONG time. Typical annoyances crop up (do the dishes, Deacon!) and then an attempted “feeding” goes a bit awry and suddenly there’s no longer 4 vampires. 
Plus, there’s now the human friend, Stu, that hangs around and helps them learn about selfies and the Internet. It’s great, and then all of a sudden there’s footage of a feeding and it’s like holy shit, this movie can get dark and scary. Basically, we loved it and we are next off to catch the other Taiki movie, Hunt For the Wilderpeople.
The other movie we went out and saw shortly before the Golden Globes aired today:
The Post (2017)
Spielberg. Streep. Hanks. Pretty awesome collection of talent and damn, they hit it out of the park in this movie. It takes place during the early 1970s as Vietnam drags on and Daniel Ellsberg gets his hands on a study (the Pentagon Papers) commissioned by Robert McNamara which effectively shows that the U.S. has known that the Vietnam War couldn’t be won. And yet, we persisted. The New York Times gets access to the Papers first but after printing a first bombshell article about it, they get slammed with a judicial mandate to stop publishing classified information. Which they acquiesce to. So the source goes to the Washington Post and it’s within this sequence of events that the movie is mostly focused on. The amazing performances by Meryl Streep as Katherine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, and Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee, 
the editor at the paper, ensure that the movie is riveting. The situation certainly can correlate to the current “fake news” onslaught against the media by those on the right wing and that even if the President is threatening you, it’s up to institutions like the NYT or the WP to fully embrace those First Amendment rights and publish the truth. It’s also quite a ride to see Graham’s evolution into someone who completely decides to inhabit the role she has and not be cowed even if she’s “just” a woman in this world. Quite a movie, and it amusingly leads right up into the Watergate break-in, so if you have some time, you can watch this and then put on All the President’s Men right after this.