Comments

Best Picture Oscar

It is just days until the Oscars and the ballots are being counted and recounted by those nerdy accountants they always drag out. With 10 pictures in the running for Best Picture this year, I think it may split the vote all over the place and make it a very close race with several movies; the bookies, however, have it down to a toss-up between The Hurt Locker and Avatar. The real question though is not who will win but who should win for Best Picture? Cast your vote and let’s see if we at [... Keep reading]

The Last Station

This is a wonderful film! It should be on the expanded Academy Awards list for Best Picture, but sadly it isn’t. At least both Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as his wife Sofya are nominated in their respective acting categories. The Last Station is the story of the last years of the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s life, his tempestuous relationship with this wife, his coterie of adoring sycophants who turned him into a cult figure, and a young man who became his personal secretary and family confidante.

Fear not though; this is not a [... Keep reading]

Valentine’s Day

Garry Marshall is brilliant. He made a mildly entertaining movie with an A-List cast and a name that virtually guarantees it a place in holiday rerun history. Valentine’s Day is like Crash-light. Really, really, really light. It follows a bunch of folks whose lives intersect in various ways as they break up, make up, find love or survive singledom on Valentine’s Day in Los Angeles.

The cast is a virtual who’s who of stars from the big and small screen – including McSteamy and McDreamy, Kathy Bates, Jamie Foxx, Topher Grace, Jessica Biel, Ashton Kutcher, Anne Hathaway, [... Keep reading]

Dear John

Dear John seemed to come out of nowhere Super Bowl weekend to rake in more than $30 million and overtake Avatar atop the Box Office charts. But those aliens of Pandora needn’t worry too much. Movie-goers will write off Dear John way before it gets anywhere near Avatar’s record-breaking totals. Not that it’s a bad movie. It just doesn’t resonate beyond the theater walls. And I didn’t cry once!

Dear John is the latest in a slew of Nicholas Sparks novels to be turned into a big screen romantic drama (The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, Nights [... Keep reading]

Seriously, A Serious Man?

Seriously? That’s what I thought when I heard the Coen Brothers film announced as an Oscar nominee for best picture. It’s out on DVD now and I have to admit I saw it a while ago but I struggled with my review because all I wanted to say about it was “I hated it.” I can’t help but think that if anybody but Joel and Ethan Coen (Academy darlings that they are) had made this movie, it would never have been nominated for an Academy Award.

A Serious Man chronicles the woes of one Larry Gopnik, [... Keep reading]

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker is one of those films that came and went without much fanfare, and then when all the awards nominations began to come out, it was on just about everyone’s list as best film of the year. (It received 9 Oscar nominations.) Fortunately, it is now out on DVD.

What sets this movie apart from most other “war films” is the silence. Instead of loud testosterone-driven battle scenes, The Hurt Locker is about the quiet, intense moments that are the norm for an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit (EOD), a squad charged [... Keep reading]

Oscar

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences released their 82nd Annual Oscar Nominations this morning. With all the other awards shows and announcements of best lists these days, it is sort of anticlimactic when they finally come out. Not a whole lot of surprises here. And I’m not sure the increase to 10 Best Picture nominees was such a great idea. Here are the nominees:

Best Picture

Avatar James Cameron and Jon Landau, Producers
The Blind Side Nominees to be determined
District 9 Peter Jackson and Carolynne [... Keep reading]

And the Razzie Goes to…

With all the best picture this and best actor that of the awards season, we would be remiss if we didn’t include the Razzie Award nominations for the worst of the year. This year there are not many surprises, and we Chicks missed most (though not all) of the nominated films. Since Sandra Bullock will no doubt be nominated for an Oscar, she will be the first actress to be both a Razzie and an Academy Award nominee in the same year. Yay, Sandra!

Here are the Razzie nominees for 2009.

Worst [... Keep reading]

The Book of Eli

End of the world as we know it/post-apocalyptic cinema is all the rage these days and The Book of Eli is the latest addition to this genre. As post-apocalypse fare, it is a pretty entertaining flick. Then again, it stars charismatic Denzel Washington who is as usual a lot of fun to watch. This time he is Eli, a lone traveler in a color-drained world some 30 years after a nuclear blast scorched the earth. He is in possession of the last known copy of the King James Bible and is on a [... Keep reading]

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is one of those small arty films starring an impressive roster of accomplished actors who probably took the gig for the love of the material rather than box-office glory. It’s a psychological drama tinged with wry humor and melancholy. So if you like that sort of stuff, you’ll probably like this film.

Robin Wright Penn plays Pippa Lee, a middle-aged woman who’s married to a much older man (Herb, played by Alan Arkin) who decides the couple should live out their remaining years together in a staid retirement community in Connecticut. [... Keep reading]