1. Star Wars didn’t win Best Picture
It’s no secret that Avatar employed revolutionary visual effects like, as many critics happily recall, Star Wars did back in 1977. Both are regarded as technological breakthroughs in respect to their generations, and it’s true. My father described his experience of sitting in the theater watching the original Star Wars, and it sounded remarkably similar to the experience I (and millions of others) had with Avatar. Roger Ebert called it “an event”, and that’s exactly what it was. With such a large array of similarities, it’s only expected that Avatar be nominated for Best Picture, just as Star Wars was. Viewers should note, however, that the film lost to Annie Hall that year for the Oscars’ top award. It’s easy to assume that the same will happen with Avatar. Now that’s not to say the two films are one in the same. They’re not. But we should be open to looking at this year’s Academy Awards with a historical frame of reference in mind. Take the 1975 Academy Awards for example. Jaws was up for the Best Picture grab that year, but lost to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Majority of us know that Jaws is more of a visually sustaining crowd-pleaser than Cuckoo’s Nest, but Cuckoo’s Nest is an all-around better movie than Jaws. The same thing applies when comparing Star Wars and Annie Hall, as well as Avatar and a number of other Best Picture contenders this year. The bottom line? Traditional movie elements and substance over pretty images and on-screen surreality, which brings up my next point. Read the rest of this entry »
Stone of Destiny turned out be be a much lower key affair than I had imagined. In fact this film based on the true story of Ian Hamilton’s dream of Scottish independence in the 1950’s started out so slowly I thought it might lapse into a coma.
Fortunately however, it turned out to be a ripping good yarn about a bunch of students who devise a plan to steal back Scotland’s Stone of Scone from deep within the bowels of Westminster Abbey.
The comedic elements that I was expecting to come to the fore and dictate the style of the film, were kept for the times in the film when nothing seemed to be going the students way. Read the rest of this entry »
Imagine, if you will, a conversation between two filmmaker friends:
Filmmaker 1 “So what’s new in the modern horror genre?”
Filmmaker 2 “Zombies?”
Filmmaker 1 “Come on, they’re a dime a dozen these days.”
Filmmaker 2 “How about that B-Horror staple: Nazis?”
Filmmaker 1 “Didn’t we see some Nazis in that French horror a year or so back? Uninspired.”
Filmmaker 2 “Hey…how about…Nazi Zombies?”
Filmmaker 1 “Holy crap?! Why didn’t I think of that?”
However it went, the result is Dead Snow (or Død Snø if you feel the Viking rise in you); a film stacked to the hilt with dirty and deadly Nazis rising from the grave. And if you that don’t make you want watch this film then maybe you should head to the romantic comedy section of the store ‘cause we ain’t hanging out tonight.
So, a bunch of med school buddies head away to a cabin in the middle of snowy nowhere for a commune-with-nature holiday. Unfortunately antisocial old man #47 turns up in the middle of their first night and informs them that this remote area – Øksfjord – has a troubled past reaching back to the Nazi occupation in WWII. Writing him off as a freaky old drunk our docs continue in party mode until the non-appearance of their friend Sara (Ane Dahl Torp) the next day (she was hiking across to the cabin cross country) begins their fast slide into horrific weirdness. Read the rest of this entry »
Given the fact that zombies evidently can’t be stopped as the subject of live-action films, I’m fairly surprised that we haven’t yet seen much in the way of animated walking dead. That might change if the film A.D. is given a chance to get off the ground. Here we have a teaser trailer that also seems to be acting as a fundraising effort. The folks behind this project definitely have the visuals down, and they’re hoping to spin this concept and world into a feature. Read the rest of this entry »
Iron Sky Fan Page Closed Down
This morning the creators of the science fiction movie Iron Sky were in for a rude surprise: their Facebook page, which has gathered thousands of fans, was closed down by the administration without any warning. Apparently Facebook considers the idea of a movie about Nazis having escaped to Moon in 1945 and coming back to invade Earth in 2018 as “hateful, threatening or obscene”.
Iron Sky is a Finnish-German sci-fi comedy with a budget of over five million euros. Over three million people have seen the teaser of the movie which was published in YouTube in spring of 2008. Read the rest of this entry »
A moving, truly gritty, post-apocalyptic drama, ‘The Road’ follows a father and son as they negotiate their way through the harsh nightmare of a suburban wasteland in the not too distant future. We are never told what catastrophe has brought about the decline of human civilisation, but we do know on thing; life as we know it, does not exist any more.
Father and Son move through this landscape literally fighting to survive every day; danger comes from all sides; the freezing cold (we never see sun in the entire movie- the sky is always grey); sickness, earthquakes, lack of clean water, it is as if the whole earth is falling apart; dry dead trees in the forest are likely to crash down randomly because they have no roots and no water to sustain them. And of course, the biggest threat of all: other human beings. Read the rest of this entry »
Precious tells the story of Clareece ‘Precious’ Jones (Sidibe), who is an obese and poor African American teenager who from a very young age has been systematically abused emotionally and physically by her mother and repeatedly raped by her father. Pregnant by him for a second time, she is expelled from school, and recommended to attend an alternative education centre. It is here where she meets an inspiring teacher whose encouragement gives her the hope for a better life.
As you can tell by that small description, this movie deals with some very dark moments in one girl’s struggle as those around her who should be loving and protecting her, are instead violently hurting her. Read the rest of this entry »
History
James Cameron has been nominated for three Oscars in the past. And he’s won three Oscars.
Statistically, that’s what we call a 100% pass rate.
It also means that not only do the blokes working behind the scenes at the Academy Awards like Cameron, they’re also more than a little inclined to shove awards his way whenever he makes a film.
We like them odds. Read the rest of this entry »
Hey Look.. Its Mel Gibson..
Yeah its been 8 long years since Mr Gibson has graced the screens. But he has been busy creating some of the decades most talked about movies. So how did he fare on his first big outing? Both Nick and Myself went off to see this screen legend return with his characteristic action sequences and witty one liners.
<Nick> Yer he’s back, Mel, in front of the camera and he’s brooding. A movie length brooding montage in every location and from every angle. Oh sure he has a lot to brood about. His daughter was literally blown away right in front of him, which looking back at the movie now drove him slightly mad. And as we’re usually looking through his eyes at the story, that may explain the rest of the movie. Read the rest of this entry »
Based on the Thomas Cobb novel of the same name, Crazy Heart tells the story of Bad Blake (Bridges), an aging country music singer who bares the emotional and physical scars of a life that has been made up of too many marriages, far too long on the road and an over abundance of whiskies along the way. However despite ending up playing in bowling alley bars to small collections of aging fans, Bad can’t help but reach out for a new reason to go on through a chance encounter with Jean (Gyllenhaal), a small-town journalist who longs to discover the real man behind the songs.
Now, for some people there will be too much music and not enough complex storylines and subplots, for others it will be vice versa, however for me it was the perfect blend of drama and melody. As the story unfolds we see this old broken down country musician stuck playing the songs that had previously brought him glory while blocked from any inspiration by the constant search for meaning at the bottom of his whisky glass. Jeff Bridges does play Bad Blake, he is Bad Blake. At no moment in this film do you not believe that Bridges is this aging and trapped musician. His acting performance is backed up thoroughly by his musical performance. When he grabs his guitar and stumbles out in front of his make shift backing band, hammering out the riffs as he leans in to the microphone and growls out these country lyrics wrought with pain, loss and failure, you can’t help but feel as though you are watching the real thing. Read the rest of this entry »
