BilmBlog500

11: 24 PM Getting back to the In Memoriam section: I first remember seeing Maggie Smith in California Suite, a 1978 movie. That’s some fifty years ago.  That’s a dang long time to be giving good performances in all sorts of movies. Dabney Coleman - Nine to Five. Classic. Dick Pope was the primary cinematographer for Mike Leigh, and had a forty year career.  Any time you can bring it for that long, any time in this job you can have a relationship with a director where the director wants to use you over and over and over again over a very long period of time… Marshall Brickman worked on several of the best Woody Allen films.  And his own movie Simon isn’t all that good, but the trip into Manhattan to see that movie over holiday break in 1980 is one of the keynote days in my coming of age as someone who really, really, really loved going to the movies.  A movie at Cinema One, a movie at the Loews Astor Plaza with mind-blowing six track 70mm sound.  A great day. Mar...

 Around 72 hours until Oscar night, as I am typing, and it's an exciting year, with a lot of heated Academy Award races, a lot of good nominees, and a lot of excitement and anticipation. My best movie rankings of last year, you'll find here . The Best Picture field isn't bad. I can't complain about Wicked, which was extremely popular, and The Conclave, which checks a lot of Oscar boxes more than pleasantly enough but is more the Zan and Jayna Wonder Twins version of an Oscar movie than an actual Oscar movie.  I can't complain about The Substance.  I don't think it 100% works, largely because the ending felt like the place to go when the filmmakers didn't know where actually to go, so they picked a direction and just kept driving. The exact opposite of Anora, which ends brilliantly.  But if not perfect, The Substance has verve, vision, good performances. I'm Still Here, Dune Part Two, A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist and Anora are all on my own list of b...

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 ...

Most of the films I liked most didn't get anywhere near a nomination for Best Picture.  There is 0% overlap between the Academy and my Ten Best list , and if I get around to posting a "worth mentioning" there might be three from that list.  But there are lots of things to be praised in the selections. And just to note, I signed up around Thanksgiving for this social media site called Letterboxd where I am listing every movie I see, and expect to review a good chunk of them. Black Panther was one of the best superhero movies in years, but that's a deeply degraded standard since most of them aren't very good at all.  But Black Panther is the work of a major filmmaker, who made a superhero movie steeped in influences from major works in the cinematic cannon rather than other superhero movies.  Sure! BlacKkKlansman is one of Spike Lee's best movies, it boasts great performances, it's timely. Sure! Bohemian Rhapsody isn't a good movie, but the last twenty ...

Midnight:  Spotlight. 11:57  I like Leonardo DiCaprio a lot, liked him from when I first saw him in Gilbert Grape a very very long time ago.  In Wolf of Wall St., in Titanic, in lots of movies.  I just wish he wasn't getting an Oscar for The Revenant. 11:53 PM I would happily see Michael Fassbender or Malcom's dad or Matt winning for Best Actor.  But this is not likely to end happily.  Steve Jobs was a great movie, and Fassbender's performance is a huge part of that. Matt Damon was too good, made it seem too easy!  Trumbo better for me than for most critics. 11:45 PM Best Actress is a depressing category for me.  Saw 45 Years, and not a fan.  And not a fan of Brooklyn, or of Carol.  Didn't see Joy.  So I guess I'll hope for Brie Larson to win, as she is touted to do. 11:38 PM Not a surprise, but I so wish something or someone else would have won for Best Director.  What can he do next year in his quest for Best Award Bait? ...

When it comes to plot-driven media like books and movies, I'm an opinionated SOB. As such, Oscar season will never be my across-the-board favorite time of year.  There will be critical darlings that aren't actually very good. Worthy movies that are just that.  Frenzies, tulip bubbles, and more.  Usually there will be a few things, but only a few, that I haven't seen; after all these years I can do a good job smelling out the movies that will leave an aftertaste. I can't remember a year with as many of those movies.  And after making a dutiful effort to catch up, only one of them was considerably better than I feared or suspected. It sure isn't The Revenant.  12 nominations for a movie I never wished to pay for, and which I could stomach for just 30 minutes when I was finally able to plan it as part of a "double feature." The plot skeleton I studied thirty years ago this week when I was handed a copy of WRITING TO SELL by Scott Meredith on my first day at h...

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...

The Oscars forced me to sit down with my print-out of the movies I'd seen that opened in 2014, and without further ado... 1.  Boyhood The very notion of the movie is crazy.  The challenges in making a film with a 12-year shooting schedule go far beyond anything.  You can't even compare it to the 7/14/21/etcUp documentary series by Michael Apted that has followed a group of kids from 7 until very close to today with films every 7 years.  It's one thing to just get together every seven years and see what's happened.  You don't have to worry about what happened in the intervening, you just have to report on it.  And in any event, Boyhood director Richard Linklater has already replicated that with his Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight series of films with Ethan Hawke and Juliette Delpy. Let's look at this: You can't sign a contract for longer than 7 years for an actor/actress, so for your primary cast members, there's the chance that you could be ...