BilmBlog500

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? ...

It was so much fun doing an exchange of movie reviews with Bryce Moore last month for Pacific Rim that I thought it would be fun to do another one with my client Tim Akers for Elysium.  Tim has just started selling an e-collection Bones of Veridon which collects some of the short fiction that first attracted me to Tim's work,  and you can also enjoy two Veridon novels, Dead of Veridon and Heart of Veridon .  Also highly recommended -- Horns of Ruin , the first fully realized blend of steampunk and sword & sorcery. The JABberwocky page for Tim Akers Tim's Blog, main link My review , on Tim's blog. Disappointysium I want to start by saying that I kind of liked this movie, in the sense that I didn't walk out and I didn't feel like I had wasted my money and I only got blood-humming angry a couple times. But really, it was a movie of great potential that made dozens of small mistakes and one major mistake that killed it for me. I wanted to like it more, but didn...

Even though I am a liberal, I have some mixed emotions regarding the environmental movement. If we end up with a choice between the last seal in the arctic or the last un-fracked farm and keeping human civilization going for a while longer, we'll keep civilization and nuke the seals. So I'm not sure what to think of Promised Land, a film directed by Gus Van Sant which has been doing the screening circuit ahead of an opening later this month.  The Variety Screening Series Q&A had producers/co-writers/stars Matt Damon and John Krasinski along with co-star Rosemarie DeWitt. Just to back up a bit, if you're not aware, "fracking" or hydraulic fracturing is a method of getting at natural gas which involves drilling down into shale, using a combination of water and chemicals to break up the shale and release the gas that's inside of it, and then get the gas above ground.  It's made a lot of natural gas more accessible.  As with clear-cut or mountain-top coal ...

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...

When I re-committed to the blog three months ago after a post-less fall 2009, one of the things I said I'd try and do was limit the length of my posts, and on balance I think I've done that. There goes that goal. There's too much going on in Green Zone (see Wednesday evening March 10, 2010 at the Universal Screening Room) to keep it short. The movie can be reviewed as a Bourne-like action movie. Green Zone star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass teamed on Bourne #2 and Bourne #3. And it can be reviewed as a polemic, yet another Iraq polemic after movies of highly variable success from Stop Loss as a very good and underrated one to In the Valley of Elah as a less successful one, or Rendition and De Palma's Redacted (watched one on HBO on Demand, didn't see the other) and etc. etc. And let us not forget Hurt Locker , which was photographed by Green Zone cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, who worked with Greengrass previously on United 93. I should probably star...

Seen at Clearview's Chelsea Cinema; auditorium #1, Sunday March 16, 2008; 2 Slithy Toads, maybe So I should have listened to Stanley Kauffmann on this one. Over the years, this long-time film critic for The New Republic has been my compadre; the one critic more than any other who speaks to my own tastes in movies. It was bitter solace when I was writing film reviews for The Michigan Daily in college, ran up in my final semester against an editor who did not appreciate me, and saw Stanley Kauffmann pick up on some of the same things in his review of Compromising Positions that I had mentioned in a spiked review of the movie. Which as I recall was replaced with one that ended with a line about seltzer in pants. And Stanley Kauffmann gave a thumbs-down on Paranoid Park. But..., the reviews were all over the map, I kind of liked the coming attraction, the release broadened from theatres where I didn't have discount tickets to one where I did, there haven't been a lot of mo...