BilmBlog500

A few weeks ago I finally caught up with Broken City, this year's MLK Weekend film from Mark Wahlberg, and was a little quicker to see Side Effects, the new movie from director Steven Soderbergh. There's a lot I can say about Broken City, not much of it good.  Wahlberg is a cop who's on trial for killing a teen in a housing project without just cause, he's found not guilty but there's some evidence we don't see that comes into the possession of the mayor played by Russell Crowe.  Several years later, Wahlberg isn't making ends meet as the head of a private detective agency, he's happy to get a call from the Mayor offering a lot of money to find out whom his wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is sleeping with.  This is happening in the midst of the Mayor's re-election campaign, and we find out that the chief aide to the Mayor's opponent seems to be Catherine Zeta-Jones's paramour.  All of this ends up tying in to some possible scandal with the sale o...

Two Quartets invaded the art house scene in the closing months of 2012. The better of them is A Late Quartet.  Christopher Walken is the cellist of a string quartet -- the other members a couple played by Catherine Keener, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and the fourth by Michael Inavar -- who finds out that he has early stages of Parkinson's.  His imminent departure creates chaos.  Ivanar starts sleeping with the couple's daughter, whom he is instructing in violin, and resists a. effort by Hoffman to split the first chair violin role.  Keener's decision to side with Ivanar and/or the good of the Quartet over her husband creates tension in their (shotgun) marriage. In hindsight, and in actually describing the plot, the melodrama of it all is readily apparent, but to the credit of the cast and filmmakers it doesn't seem that way at all in the watching.  Quite the contrary, everyone plays with such conviction you would feel certain this is as much a documentary as the fi...

In the last week before the Oscars, I caught up with one Best Picture nominee and a couple in other categories... I walked out of Amour, the nightly regarded French film from director Michael Hanecke which has five nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress.  It is a very clinical look at an aging couple.  There is no suspense about the wife's fate.  The movie starts with police entering the couple's apartment to find her body beautifully laid out on the bed surrounded by flower petals.  And then the rest of the movie takes us back to the start -- she blanks one day -- and then forward.  That one day is a harbinger of her continued deterioration, needing a cane then a scooter and etc. etc. we know how it ends. I just read that the script was 69 pages, not much more than an hour of film time, but the film ends up over two hours log because things take longer when you have lead actors in their 80s.  Very worthy, except turning 75 minute films into t...

My reviews of some of the Oscar-nominated movies: Argo, Flight The Master Life of Pi, Anna Karenina, Beasts of the Southern Wild Skyfall Wreck-It Ralph Silver Linings Playbook Lincoln, The Impossible Django Unchained, Les Miz, Zero Dark Thirty Amour and No And my Live Blog of the Oscar Telecast: 12:20 am -- the telecast In recent years I've felt as if the Oscars were often a little bit perfunctory, checking boxes and doing what you do without any thought or passion.  There will never likely be the perfect Oscar telecast.  It can't redeem itself like the Grammys or the Tonys can with live performances.  I'm fairly certain the Academy will be respectful enough of the art of film that the awards nobody cares about will continue to be on the show.  There's only so much you can do and still do the show.  Within those limitations, I thought this year's broadcast was quite well done.  Like Argo, there were things the people making the show wanted to do, and for th...