Non Spoilerific Movie Round Up: Oscars Nomination Round 1
You better believe we're watching a film a day at the moment; please don't make recommendations to me until after the Oscars as I just won't have time.
Bolt: Disney family fun genericide; it's more fun than I was expecting but it won't ever shine a light to Wall-E. John Travolta and Susie Essman star as the Hollywood dog lost in the wilderness and the savvy street cat who helps him back to the set to find his Human (Miley Cyrus). The real star here is Mike Walton as Rhino the overly enthusiastic hamster. Definitely improved by the fact that Disney have learnt to poke fun at themselves and their own genre.
The Duchess: This belongs firmly in the same mindset as the nomination for Marie Antoinette last year; it's all about costume extravagance and art direction. Apart from this it is a very standard regency drama about a very non standard regency figure. The story is based on the memoirs of Georgiana Cavendish the Duchess of Devonshire; renowned socialite, patron of the arts, pre suffrage politico matriarch, fashionista and a surprisingly tolerated polygamist. A real "must see" for the goth hedonists, probably a bore to everyone else; I could have watched this film with the sound off and a favourite album and pretended it was a 2 hour film clip and felt more satisfied. Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes give solid performances as the Duke and Duchess.
Hellboy II: Much like The Duchess this is in the category of "beautiful but substanceless," even as a comic book fan I was underwhelmed with the adventure though I put this squarely down to the irritatingly swooning goth twat archetypes of the Fae. Real fae should be powerful and scarey not look as though they're going to spout poetry because I turned them down for a date. But nonetheless it's a continuing adaption of the comics and Ron Perlman and Selma Blair are quite fun, Doug Jones/David Hyde Pierce are wonderful (but totally unimaginable as heterosexual) as Abe Sapien and the addition of Johann Krauss more than makes up for the loss of the steampunk-tastic Kroenen from the first Hellboy film. The set design and character design are the real stars here though, directed by Guillermo del Toro it has the same dark fairy tale feel as Pan's Labyrinth and he's utilised much of the same effects and puppetry team as well as leaning on Doug Jones' immaculate body work for additional ethereal characters. Beautiful, dark and comic adventurey but a bit silly over all and definitely for the child in all of us.
Slumdog Millionaire: I <3 Danny Boyle to start with, most of you will know him from Trainspotting but he's also responsible for 28 Days Later, The Beach, Sunshine and bringing Cillian Murphy into my life. I'm positively shocked that this movie is getting American attention, it has few beautiful co-stars, no Christian message and is full of all the real hardships of growing up in a slum... death, chaos, prostitution, gang war fare, child mutilation and constant loss. On the other hand this deserves every piece of praise it is getting. Based on the book called Q&A the premise is simple; a boy from one of the slums of Mumbai reaches the last question of a game show, but with no education how did he manage this? The film is a set of interwoven stories of the boy's life told to the police as he is interrogated for cheating; with each story uncovering part of his history and a method to finding the clue to his question... be it on religion, foreign currency or more importantly Cricket. The character actors are impeccable, the stories woven together wonderfully, the "Where's Wally" fun of finding how he answered the question and the use of colour in his memories divine. Throw in a few references for the Bollywood fanatic and this is all around an excellent film that deserves every nomination it has. Kudos to the casting director, particularly for the use of Dev Patel, a shining pretty boy Bollywood star would have totally ruined the loveable nature of his downtrodden character.
Tropic Thunder: This would have been significantly better than it was if Ben Stiller had put someone else in the role he gave himself. The movie is supposedly inspired by Stiller's experience on the set of Empire of the Sun and I'd have hoped more for a film made 20 years after its inception. The best part of the film is the introduction of the main characters where fake film trailers and consumer product spots outline our stars. The plot is silly but good fun, a group of Hollywood superstar charicatures akin to a movie set Drawn Together are dropped into the jungles of Laos to give an "authentic" air to their Vietnam War film, little do they know the Director is dead and they've walked into the Golden Triangle and a Laotian turf war, wackiness ensues. Unsurprisingly this is nominated for the best thing in the film; Robert Downey Jr as the method actor Australian playing a Black Power marine, with some of the most realistic racial makeup I've seen on film.
Wall-E: In my my not so humble opinion and somewhat obsessive animation fan behaviour I consider this to be the best film Pixar have done to date. It does have a fairly saccharine message but in today's day and age it's not an unreasonable one to teach children. A megacorp consumer organisation has raped the Earth of its resources and reduced its citizens to buyer-zombies. In a desperate bid the humans are shipped out on a flotilla of space cruise ships and Earth is left to be cleaned up by an army of robots. Unfortunately the monumental task is a little more than expected, and Wall-E is the last of his kind left in his lonely vigil finding small pieces of delight in his trashcan metropolis. EVE is a biological probe designed to check the bio-viability of Earth, Wall-E falls in love and tries to rescue her when she is returned to her home ship. Pixar have reached a simply beautiful evolution of their animation, plastic perfection and rubbish tip destruction are both immaculately executed. The characters are cartoonish but still heart warming and Wall-E so engaging that you don't realise it's over half an hour before there is a single line of dialogue. Loveable, wonderful and totally deserving of an Oscar.
Bolt: Disney family fun genericide; it's more fun than I was expecting but it won't ever shine a light to Wall-E. John Travolta and Susie Essman star as the Hollywood dog lost in the wilderness and the savvy street cat who helps him back to the set to find his Human (Miley Cyrus). The real star here is Mike Walton as Rhino the overly enthusiastic hamster. Definitely improved by the fact that Disney have learnt to poke fun at themselves and their own genre.
The Duchess: This belongs firmly in the same mindset as the nomination for Marie Antoinette last year; it's all about costume extravagance and art direction. Apart from this it is a very standard regency drama about a very non standard regency figure. The story is based on the memoirs of Georgiana Cavendish the Duchess of Devonshire; renowned socialite, patron of the arts, pre suffrage politico matriarch, fashionista and a surprisingly tolerated polygamist. A real "must see" for the goth hedonists, probably a bore to everyone else; I could have watched this film with the sound off and a favourite album and pretended it was a 2 hour film clip and felt more satisfied. Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes give solid performances as the Duke and Duchess.
Hellboy II: Much like The Duchess this is in the category of "beautiful but substanceless," even as a comic book fan I was underwhelmed with the adventure though I put this squarely down to the irritatingly swooning goth twat archetypes of the Fae. Real fae should be powerful and scarey not look as though they're going to spout poetry because I turned them down for a date. But nonetheless it's a continuing adaption of the comics and Ron Perlman and Selma Blair are quite fun, Doug Jones/David Hyde Pierce are wonderful (but totally unimaginable as heterosexual) as Abe Sapien and the addition of Johann Krauss more than makes up for the loss of the steampunk-tastic Kroenen from the first Hellboy film. The set design and character design are the real stars here though, directed by Guillermo del Toro it has the same dark fairy tale feel as Pan's Labyrinth and he's utilised much of the same effects and puppetry team as well as leaning on Doug Jones' immaculate body work for additional ethereal characters. Beautiful, dark and comic adventurey but a bit silly over all and definitely for the child in all of us.
Slumdog Millionaire: I <3 Danny Boyle to start with, most of you will know him from Trainspotting but he's also responsible for 28 Days Later, The Beach, Sunshine and bringing Cillian Murphy into my life. I'm positively shocked that this movie is getting American attention, it has few beautiful co-stars, no Christian message and is full of all the real hardships of growing up in a slum... death, chaos, prostitution, gang war fare, child mutilation and constant loss. On the other hand this deserves every piece of praise it is getting. Based on the book called Q&A the premise is simple; a boy from one of the slums of Mumbai reaches the last question of a game show, but with no education how did he manage this? The film is a set of interwoven stories of the boy's life told to the police as he is interrogated for cheating; with each story uncovering part of his history and a method to finding the clue to his question... be it on religion, foreign currency or more importantly Cricket. The character actors are impeccable, the stories woven together wonderfully, the "Where's Wally" fun of finding how he answered the question and the use of colour in his memories divine. Throw in a few references for the Bollywood fanatic and this is all around an excellent film that deserves every nomination it has. Kudos to the casting director, particularly for the use of Dev Patel, a shining pretty boy Bollywood star would have totally ruined the loveable nature of his downtrodden character.
Tropic Thunder: This would have been significantly better than it was if Ben Stiller had put someone else in the role he gave himself. The movie is supposedly inspired by Stiller's experience on the set of Empire of the Sun and I'd have hoped more for a film made 20 years after its inception. The best part of the film is the introduction of the main characters where fake film trailers and consumer product spots outline our stars. The plot is silly but good fun, a group of Hollywood superstar charicatures akin to a movie set Drawn Together are dropped into the jungles of Laos to give an "authentic" air to their Vietnam War film, little do they know the Director is dead and they've walked into the Golden Triangle and a Laotian turf war, wackiness ensues. Unsurprisingly this is nominated for the best thing in the film; Robert Downey Jr as the method actor Australian playing a Black Power marine, with some of the most realistic racial makeup I've seen on film.
Wall-E: In my my not so humble opinion and somewhat obsessive animation fan behaviour I consider this to be the best film Pixar have done to date. It does have a fairly saccharine message but in today's day and age it's not an unreasonable one to teach children. A megacorp consumer organisation has raped the Earth of its resources and reduced its citizens to buyer-zombies. In a desperate bid the humans are shipped out on a flotilla of space cruise ships and Earth is left to be cleaned up by an army of robots. Unfortunately the monumental task is a little more than expected, and Wall-E is the last of his kind left in his lonely vigil finding small pieces of delight in his trashcan metropolis. EVE is a biological probe designed to check the bio-viability of Earth, Wall-E falls in love and tries to rescue her when she is returned to her home ship. Pixar have reached a simply beautiful evolution of their animation, plastic perfection and rubbish tip destruction are both immaculately executed. The characters are cartoonish but still heart warming and Wall-E so engaging that you don't realise it's over half an hour before there is a single line of dialogue. Loveable, wonderful and totally deserving of an Oscar.