BilmBlog500

The Morning After... If you’ve watched Tootsie, the very long acceptance speech from Renée Zellweger ultimately started to remind me of Michael Dorsey’s when he wants to reveal the truth about his identity and knows where he’s going but is very lost in getting there.  As Renée is the co-star of Jerry Maguire, which is one of my all-time favorite movies, and gave a performance in Judy that shows her in utter command at very moment of a character who is clearly Judy in every moment and maybe Judy Garland in very few of them, and as she has had a career with quite a few bounces to it, some of them off the table and rolling around on the floor for a few years, I am deeply happy for her win.  And as someone who was raving up every acting award, I sure do wish her speech had been less improvisational than Michael Dorsey’s. Joaquin Phoenix’s speech also rambled.  I’m not entirely sure what he was saying though I heard every word of it, and am intrigued the morning after to disco...

12:05 AM - And we'll call this a wrap for the Live Blog.  I may have more to say about some of my favorite movies of 2018, but for the Oscars, it's a night.  I know I've done better jobs on the live blog than this year, but since they eliminated around a half hour of Stuff, they eliminated a lot of the down time when I could pay less attention to what was on the screen, and more to my typing.  I'll take that trade-off any day. 12:03 AM -- Best Actress.  Prior to going for a repeat viewing of The Wife a couple of weeks ago, I don't believe I've ever gone back twice to a movie just to see a brilliant performance by an actress.  I am deeply disappointed for Glenn Close.  I might have a hard time separating out Olivia Colman's performance from my overall dislike for the movie she was in.  But even allowing for that, I can't see Colman's performance as better than the third or fourth best in the category, because Melissa McCarthy is a knockout in Can You ...

Movies are the one, or at least the longest, constant in my life.  I can easily recall movie moments from my teenage years, even early in.  I was twelve when I saw Star Wars, and know that I saw it in Monticello.  So Oscar night is always special to me, the High Holidays of my secular religion. But this year has an off taste for me, part #OscarsSoWhite, discussed below, and part #OscarsSoTrite, which will be discussed in another post and/or within my live blog of this year's Oscar ceremony. A year ago, I thought Selma was a worthy movie, kind of like how I felt about Gandhi when I saw that 33 years ago, and how I've felt about quite a few biopics over the years.  With Selma nominated in the Best Picture category, with its elastic number of potential nominees, #OscarsSoWhite felt abstract to me. But in 2015, two movies, Love and Mercy and Straight Outta Compton raised the bar for the genre of the musical biopic.  Considering how many appreciably triter biopics h...

I don't know how Bryce Moore manages with two kids to find time for more movie reviews than I do, but it's time to at least say something in preparation for Sunday's Oscar ceremony! We have nine Best Picture nominees, I've seen all of them to some extent or another. Let's say I won't be rooting for Hugo.  I started to feel weary within ten or fifteen minutes of the film starting.  I eventually woke up, decided sleeping was to be preferred, and ended up walking out.  During the brief moments that I was awake, I could see that the movie was brilliantly made from a production design standpoint or a music standpoint or in any and many fashions you could say.  But the story was just boring, I didn't care about the kid, I didn't want to see a peon to motion picture history or preservation. I also left The Help.  I hadn't read the book, I read the first page or so and recoiled at the very thought of it.  Trying to watch the movie cold reminded me of what it...

Midnight Eastern.  This was a very good Oscar telecast.  Not perfect.  Curtain over screen doesn't want to open, the Heath Ledger and Memoriam things.  But awfully danged good.  3:30 from beginning to the end of the credit roll, which is not bad at all for an Oscar telecast.  They did it tight while recognizing that the telecast isn't long and boring because of the acceptance speeches which the producers have no control over and which thus must be kept to 30 seconds max but rather because of the things they do have control over.  So Jerry Lewis didn't have the longest Hersholt presentation, perhaps sometimes they've actually gone on too long.  The acting awards were presented in a new and different way that lasted no much longer than if they had given that same time to the usual 30 second film clip, but this seemed much nicer and more affecting, in part because actors many of them don't lack for ego and this allowed them all to have it indulged for a few seconds.  W...

Having now seen The Class and Frozen River, I've seen pretty much an Oscar nommed movie I'm intending to see and blogged accordingly.  Best Picture is less than a day away.  It's time to talk some about the nominations and go on record before the envelopes are opened. I've seen "only" 85ish movies that opened in 2008, but that does include virtually every feature-length film with an Oscar nomination, except I think a total of 4 noms for these 4 films: The Duchess; Hellboy 2; Happy-go-Lucky; and The Visitor.  I walked out on Kung Fu Panda.  Some films I may have been more awake for than others.  Some of the films I might have skipped if not for the Variety Screening Series.  I'm pretty certain I'd have skipped The Wrestler, and I may have caught The Reader only reluctantly after the nominations were announced.  I'm so glad Melissa Leo got a Best Actress nom for Frozen River, giving me an excuse to see a movie I'd missed, instead of Kristen Scott...