BilmBlog500

11:39 pm - only three hours and thirty nine minutes, about how long it takes to read a Bookstore Care or Aurora Teagarden or Ground Rules mystery.  And about half as long as sitting thru All Quiet.  11:32 pm - Everything Everywhere All at Oscar. 11:23 pm -  Encino Man and George of the Jungle are the big winners tonight.  I’m very happy for Brendan Fraser.  I would have first seen Fraser in Nancy Savoca’s Dogfight in 1991. As a hunk in School Ties. Over thirty years later… 11:16 pm - The ads have been disappointing.  I’m yearning for Ellen DeGeneris ads for regular low pricing at J C Penney. Ads for a plan that was a great and also utterly ruinous idea simultaneously. For something, though, that feels fresh and distinct and creative.  Not Rolex ads that are like Rolex ads in the Wimbledon final. 11:12 pm - Two more prizes, editing and Director, for Everything Everywhere All at Once.  This seems like a good occasion to post a link to an LA Times ar...

 Sigh. This isn't going to be a great year for hate watching the Oscars. Before I get deep into, you can see my Top Ten of 2022 here . There is one and only one Best Picture nominee that I disliked intensely, which is All Quiet on the Western Front. If it wins, I'll be too frozen to deal from hell freezing over to car.  If it wins something else, I'm not going to spend the emotional energy.  And part of me admires Netflix's ability year after year to take some piece of claptrap artsy filmmaking and invest millions of dollars and get it into the completion. I wish every of my clients' books would be published with similar investment and enthusiasm. I don't even know what movie I'm rooting for.  I saw The Fabelmans twice, it held up well, and it's a great movie. I've seen Top Gun: Maverick a handful of times, and could watch it over and over and over again. Tar has kept its pull on me four months after, and I might just see it again this weekend.  I di...

  A perfectly fine way to spend a couple hours.  There isn’t a plot per se. The movie is so disinterested in plot that we don’t even know until well into the movie what our competing bands of thieves are vying for.  But the string of incidents is acted by an excellent cast, all of whom seem to be enjoying the,eves.  Hugh Grant is especially enjoying, channeling Michael Caine, portraying a James Bond villain with the megalomania dialed down to around a 1 on the scale,. You really have to see the performance, as well as Josh Hartnett’s, to understand them.I don’t want to try. The flaw of the movie is that there are too many characters in that in between place of needing either to do more or to br consolidated. Like, what if the Cary Elwes character were a little more Peter Graves in Mission: Impossible and actually part of it, rather than being an M in a movie that already has an M. And that would free up Aubrey Plaza to be the sniper\sharpshooter, which would be a nic...