BilmBlog500

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...

It's extremely rare to get to the end of a movie and be left wanting more, but that's how I felt at the end of The Social Network, the extremely delightful film directed by David Fincher, with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin based on The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. I wanted more. I was so delighted by the music, by the writing, by the performances, by the unobtrusive craft in every frame and every minute, by the true drama still made with enough wit that I found more laughs here than in many an alleged comedy I had seen, that when we got to the end and I realized we were at the end that I deflated a bit that there wasn't going to be another hour I could be entertained. This movie is good. It is good, good, good, it is Empire Strikes Back good because that's about how rarely it comes along that I am Not Happy that I will have to leave a movie behind. Jerry Maguire, maybe, or Bull Durham, there just aren't too many movies I can think of over the past 30 year...

The third movie I saw this past weekend was Solitary Man. If Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work benefited from a good trailer, Solitary Man suffers from a bad one. It got across the point that the movie starred Michael Douglas and had three other actors who usually do interesting work: Susan Sarandon; Danny Devito, and Jesse Eisenberg. But it also made the movie seem dull, filled with boring talk about boring relationships. In fact, the movie is quite lively, and Michael Douglas gives a nuanced and energetic performance of a role that isn't easily played. His character's that of a car dealer named Ben Kalmen who took a wrong ethics turn and ended up paying a huge fine. He's trying to get back in the game, but he also has a thing for self-destructive behavior which isn't helping. In particular, he's very fond of hitting on women 30 years younger than he. He's on somewhat decent terms with his ex-wife played by Susan Sarandon, but not on very good terms at all wi...

In the past six months, we've had three movies full of debris-ridden interstates, broken pavement, downed bridges, overturned shopping carts as symbol of dead nomadic humans. The first of those was Zombieland (seen in October 2009 at the Regal/UA Kaufman Astoria 14), which arrived during my blogging interregnum, and which I consider to be a thoroughgoing delight. If it wasn't written with its two leads in mind, it was certainly impeccaby cast with two actors who took full advantage of every opportunity the script had to give them. Woody Harrelson has had a very strong year ranging from his excellent deadpan laconic zombie killer here to the equally laconic but totally different soldier he plays in The Messenger . I'm not sure Jesse Eisenberg is yet capable of bringing life to an inert script; he certainly doesn'tmake Adventureland sing. But this young actor wasn't even 20 when he made Roger Dodger sing, barely old enough to drink when he delivered a performa...

Adventureland.  Seen Sunday evening March 22, 2009 at the DGA Theatre.  1.5 slithy toads. This new movie from director Greg Mottola is essentially the straight version of the much much better Edge of Seventeen .  Released in 1998, Edge of Seventeen is a very tender gay coming of age story set against a summer job in an amusement park where the young lovers have a boss played by a comedian (Lea Delaria).  If you like that kind of thing this is definitely the sort of thing you like, and a little bit down the road I was very happy when the debut director David Moreton set his sights on a book I represent, James Robert Baker's Testosterone , as the source material for his second film .   Two years before the release of Edge of Seventeen, Greg Mottola's first film The Daytrippers was released.  It was a dull-ish but critically well received (overly well-received, one should say) film with decent actors schlepping to NYC in a station wagon.  After a long time in the movie wildernes...