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Why are all these posts concentrating on little categories like “Best Actor” and “Best Director” when what we all really care about is Art Direction and Costumes? In the course of seeing all of the films nominated for the big eight I ended up seeing most of the films nominated for all those other categories they hand out awards to in the middle 2 hours of the Oscar telecast. Since you obviously care about my make-up preferences, please, read on!
Best Song
“Falling Slowly” Once, “Raise it Up” August Rush, “Happy Working Song” Enchanted, “So Close” Enchanted, “That’s How You Know” Enchanted
For some reason I feel like I already covered this category. But since the Academy stupidly ignored my recommendations, let’s take a look at these inferior choices.
The clear winner for me is “Falling Slowly.” It’s the central song in the wonderful musical Once that embodies the heartbreak and loneliness of the main characters. “Raise it Up” is actually fairly offbeat and I imagine it works well in the film, schmaltzy as it surely is. Nothing against Enchated, but if one of its triumvirate wins it better be “That’s How You Know,” a clever take on the Disney fairy tale tune set in modern times. “Happy Working Song” is a cute but uninspiring ditty while “So Close” is a toothless and unmemorable love song.
Snubs: See my breakdown of the eligible songs to find about a dozen songs I liked better than all the non-Once songs. Read the rest of this entry »
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is one of those films whose technical mastery I can admire but failed to really grab me.
Julian Schnabel has created and interesting, unique, and innovative film exploring the experience of a man locked into his own mind, able to communicate with only an eyelid. For roughly the first half of the film, we see only what Jean-Dominique Bauby, the unfortunate cripple, sees. This means a limited, often unfocused and confusing view from one eye. It’s a very neat concept and we can really feel Bauby’s initial bewilderment. These are paired with some beautifully-shot fantasy sequences. Janusz Kaminski scored a well-deserved Best Cinematography Oscar nomination for his work. The view from the one eye was probably my favorite part of the movie and I think it lost some punch when eventually the view pulls away and we see Bauby as an outside observer. Read the rest of this entry »
I like characters. I like characters more when they actually do something. I like nuance. I like nuance more when it isn’t just for the sake of nuance. I actually think John just about nailed it with his original thoughts - a review I believe he’d now like to recant. Adam must have gotten to him or something.
I’m just struggling to understand why a drama with little to no discernible drama, thrills, or suspense has garnered so much acclaim. Sure, it is an exaggeration to say the plot was entirely linear, there were maybe three kinks in there. Of course, if one of those Kinks isn’t Ray Davies, what’s the point? Ah, British Invasion humor! Read the rest of this entry »
So it took me a long while to figure out first, if I liked the movie, second, how much I liked it, and third, why I liked it. End conclusion: I liked it a lot, but I’m still not even sure why, so please excuse the stream of consciousness nature of this post.
As you can tell from some of my other reviews, I kind of like comparing movies to other movies. Except There Will Be Blood is the most original movie I’ve seen in a long while, and the closest comparison I can make is Citizen Kane, which is unfair to both Paul Thomas Anderson and Orson Welles.
After throwing John a bone with Talk to Me, I can now criticize his opinions to my heart’s content (that’s how it works, right?). I really liked this movie. In fact, if you have been reading religiously to all the posts (so, really I’m talking to the three other guys who right for this), you’ll notice that it was in my original top 5 movies of the year. I thought it was a great character study with some very memorable performances. And, this is where John and my opinions diverge.
Read the rest of this entry »
Ah, finally. I’ve been waiting oh so long to take Brian to task. He writes in his No Country post how “endings aren’t that big a deal to [him].” He then goes on to some tortured math, equating the final Sopranos scene and the closing shots of The Departed to 10% of a movie. Dear oh dear. I think even the argument that each X percent of a movie should be weighted equally is flawed, though I’m not fervently opposed to it.
A somewhat appropriate analogy might be a gymnastics routine. Like the floor exercise, a movie can be filled with Celine Dion songs and flips and never ever leaving the mat (oh, and if you are Brian, 15 year old girls), but if you don’t stick the landing, the judges are going to dock you like crazy. Oh, um, I might be a bit of an Olympics junkie. Read the rest of this entry »
I can understand why someone wouldn’t like Into the Wild but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Yes it’s long and yes it’s slow-paced and yes it’s at times full of itself. But I was pulled into it and didn’t feel its long runtime until the very end.
The film walks a thin line between glamorizing McCandless and disapproving of his attitude and journey. He’s romanticized prominently but the negative aspects are more subtle until the end. Occasionally you think throughout the film, “man this guy’s kind of a dick” but by the end there’s no doubt. “Yes,” you say, “he’s definitely a dick.” I still felt for the guy at the end, but he is exposed as a naive, stubborn kid whose flaws did him in. The glamor is completely gone at the end as he realizes he’s eschewed a major part of the human experience - social interaction - in his deluded search for truth.
I’ll probably be repeating some of the themes we discussed at Dremo’s, so bear with me, but my main problem with Into the Wild was that Christopher “Alexander Supertramp” McCandless was so obnoxious and irredeemable that I was rooting for his inevitable death throughout. Maybe its because I have an anti-hippie streak in me, but I had no empathy for his character’s “F— the World” mentality.
Had I been completely ignorant of Oscar hype going into this movie, I’m not sure i would have pegged anything about it as Oscar material. Nothing about the movie struck me as particularly ambitious. The subplots (e.g. all the family issues) onto which I would have imagined Oscar latching weren’t particularly developed or stark. As much as I loved The Girl Next Door, Emile Hirsch didn’t seem all that special in the movie. The directing and cinematography seemed subpar to me, especially considering the material. And while I liked the supporting crew, I personally didn’t see anything memorable. That’s not to say I didn’t like the movie. I just found it, like American Gangster or Eastern Promises (generally speaking, at least), a movie enjoyable enough, but I’ll likely mostly forget it in a few months, and not really miss much.
The Eddie Vedder songs were pleasant enough, though I couldn’t remember them by the end of the night. And I don’t think the Abita Purple Haze had anything to do with that. In a vacuum, I’m not opposed to one getting a nomination, I can’t say for sure yet whether I think it would be in my top five.
Michael Clayton is another in a long line of films this year that I liked but didn’t love. It’s billed as a legal/ mystery thriller but in reality it’s more of a character drama. If anything the film is too character-driven because the plot is distressingly straight forward. But as a film that depends heavily on its characters it’s getting buzz for acting nominations for Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, and George Clooney and all three would be fine choices. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m going to throw this out there to start things off: endings aren’t that big a deal to me. I see a movie’s ending as just one small part in the larger sum in weighing whether or not I liked it. I think Signs is a great movie; it’s thrilling, funny, and has shades of Hitchcock’s The Birds, which I also love. But I understand when people say the ending sucked…and while I half-heartedly agree with them, I really don’t care that much.
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