February 15, 2009: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Oh, David Fincher, when will you let me rave again about your films? I know the critics liked Zodiac and I don’t take issue with that. Panic Room wasn’t a masterpiece although it still had the basic meat of a “Fincheresque” film. But I still cling […]
February 14, 2009: Bolt Bolt is the “other” movie nominated for Best Animated Feature of 2008. Wall-E (Pixar) and Kung Fu Panda (Dreamworks) fill the standard slots, and this is the wildcard. Bolt was FAR better than that wildcard movie tends to be, which is a step ahead of the usual for me. The story […]
February 7, 2009: The Visitor I had heard about The Visitor for quite a while, and planned to see it, so it was great to see Richard Jenkins, a long-time character actor, get a Best Actor nomination and put this on my list to see before the end of February. Richard Jenkins has been around […]
February 6, 2009: Frozen River Now, here’s a revelation! A quiet, understated little movie, nominally anchored around one woman’s struggles, but with a supporting tapestry of characters and settings which perfectly capture the bleak and hopeless tone found in so much of the movie. But bleak and hopeless though it may seem, these people have […]
February 6, 2009: The Duchess At this point, I’m in the heart of my push to view all of the Oscar nominees. The Duchess was nominated for Costumes and Art Direction, which is entirely to be expected for such a period drama. In the late 1700s, an aging British Duke (Ralph Fiennes) needing a male […]
February 5, 2009: Hellboy 2: The Golden Army I knew that there was a previous Hellboy movie, and didn’t know that there was a sequel, but I watched this because of the Oscar nomination for Makeup. It turns out to be some kind of tongue-in-cheek superhero/mutant story, and actually pretty funny, with Ron Perlman in […]
February 2, 2009: Revanche Revanche was the 2008 Austrian entry for the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film, which is more or less why I saw it. The trouble I have with reviewing this film is that although I wrote a 250-word plot summary in my notes following my viewing, to reveal much at all of […]
February 2, 2009: Australia Uh oh. Here’s another review which threatens to keep me stalled for weeks even as I push to bring myself back up to date so that I can review movies within a month or so of actually watching them. I had mixed expectations going into Australia, being generally a fan of […]
January 28, 2009: The Wrestler Every awards season has one or two juggernaut movies, labours of love by filmmakers and their actors, which somehow manage to rise above obscurity and become talked about at water-coolers everywhere. The Wrestler was such an example this year, and the back story of how this movie came to be, […]
January 27, 2009: In Bruges I had been told by a friend for months that I should definitely see In Bruges. I dragged my feet because I don’t know much about Colin Farrell, and while I usually like dryly humorous gangster movies, for some reason the marketing campaign hadn’t coveyed that to me. I finally […]