BilmBlog500

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...

11:37 having the presenter do all the encomia for the acting nominees instead of the array of past winners, well OK, not lime the thing they did the past few years is unalterable. But the Best Picture nominees are all lumped into one montage. The producers don't have their names read aloud and have to settle for just type on the screen. And even the Best Picture winers have to deal with music telling them time is too shirt. C'mon, broadcast somewhere around 3:15 you can let the winners for Best Picture have their say. 11:32 why Jurassic Park music of all the films Spielberg has directed 11:31 not in love with his acceptance speech. trying too hard. 11:25 Colin Firth was also great in A Single Man last year. 11:20 unless Jeff Bridges wins in a category that is almost certainly and deservedly going to Colin Firth, safe to say that True Grit is the evening's big loser. Lots of nominations, lots of bos office, no love from Oscar. I didn't like the movie all that muspch sav...

Rabbit Hole is based on the 2007 play of the same name by David Lindsay-Abaire which I managed to miss both in NYC and in DC. It's a very well-acted but not entirely convincing domestic drama about a couple trying to deal with the death of their 4-year old son eight months before, the couple played by Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart and her mother played by Dianne Wiest. It's hard in some ways to judge a movie with subject matter like this. Both my parents are in their '80s and aren't going to be around forever. Their five children all got virtually identical upbringings and especially insofar as religion is concerned have managed to end up at all different kinds of places as adults. I am looking forward with a certain dread fascination to seeing how this all plays out when we have to deal with a loss in the family, as someday we are certainly going to have to do. For one, I don't currently anticipate that I'll want to do everything the handbook of Jewish m...

Love and Other Drugs is a definite cut above most of the other dreary formulaic romantic comedies that have graced our screens in recent years. This one is striving to attain Jerry Maguire territory instead of Wedding Planner territory. If it doesn't ultimately achieve Jerry Maguire, it still has considerable virtues on display. Let us start in the virtue department with the acting. I have always liked Jake Gyllenhal, but the opening scene here is revelatory because he looks for the first time like an actual adult in an adult role. This transition isn't an inevitable one; McCauley Culkin anyone? And there is energy and brio to the performance as well, vs the hangdog Donnie Darko thing he often defaults to. He is actually a leading man, and if he can hold on to that moving forward Incan anticipate some nice nights at the movies. His love interest is played by Anne Hathaway, and she too is making a nice transition which we have steadily seen in the years since Princess Diaries....

Seen Monday evening   September 29, 2008 at the Landmark Sunshine, Auditorium #1, 3 Slithy Toads I was so quick to post negatively about the first film I saw in this year's Variety Screening Series that I should have been much quicker to enthuse about Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married."  But better late than never. Jonathan Demme's had a very uneven career as a director, from the excellent and energetic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense and film adaptation of Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia, on to Married to the Mob and Something Wild (not bad, though others love more than I), continuing to The Silence of the Lambs and the excellent Philadelphia to The Truth About Charlie remake (which I love more than others) to a remake of The Manchurian Candidate (which needed better tighter editing; even scene seemed to last a beat too long making it rather a chore) and now to Rachel Getting Married, which I think might be up there with Philadelphia ...