I do find it rather contrary that on the day of the oscars I saw this and My Blueberry Nights again (the latter as a rather lovely time-filler between Nic Cage and red carpet) but ... that's how I roll (sorry, I've been wanting to get that phrase in the blog for a while, I got "the goods" in during the Blueberry review so at least I'm amusing myself 
).
This was ... not good. I saw the first film on tv and while it wasn't the greatest televisual experience of my life it was incredibly stupid but quite fun. This is just as stupid, but lacks most of the things that appealed to me about the original. Firstly, I cannot believe it's written by the same people, the original was full of one-liners, Justin Bartha stole the show and Cage seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself. This one though seems to go for "silly" comedy a lot more and combine that with the stupidity of the general plot anyway and you're guaranteed to lose a few brain-cells watching this one.
Kruger is probably the only person to improve on the performance in the original, Cage snoozes his way through the film and is joined by fellow sleepwalkers Jon Voight and Helen Mirren, playing his parents. Ed Harris is on cruise control, it's just a very flaccid effort on all fronts from everyone involved.
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On to the oscars. Virgin screwed me over ... twice. Was watching it on Sky Movies Premiere ... that died after an hour so I missed Amy Adams 
). Then 20 minutes later (after missing Javier's win) I found it on Sky Screen ... and then that died at 4am around the time of the cinematography award. Just said the channel was not on air 
. Yet all the other sky movie channels were working, I was furious, I have no idea what was going on. Came upstairs and tried to find it online for 30 minutes (whilst simultaneously swearing a lot at someone on MSN ... forgive me, it was a stressful moment 
) before realising ... I actually didn't care who won director and best film and decided to sod it and go to bed.
As you can see from yesterday my tech predictions completely sucked. I think they did a terrible job overall - the year was bad to start with, then the nominations were really poor and not representative of the best of the year and on top of that I only agreed with a third of their decision *just based on their nominees*. Awful oscars this year in terms of what they went for, but a very entertaining hosting job from Jon Stewart and a good performance from La Chenoweth.