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By Arty Chick, on March 3rd, 2010
 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]
By Arty Chick, on February 21st, 2010
 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]
By Arty Chick, on February 6th, 2010
 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]
By Arty Chick, on February 2nd, 2010
 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]
By Adventurous Chick, on February 1st, 2010
 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]
By Arty Chick, on January 24th, 2010
 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]
By Arty Chick, on January 11th, 2010
 Terry Gilliam does not make mainstream movies. They are always quirky and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is no exception. Part of the strangeness this time is that (as anyone who has not been living in an underground lair is aware) Heath Ledger died while they were shooting and they had to come up with a way to finish it without him. So for three fantasy sequences in the movie (that somehow make perfect sense anyway), the character Tony meant to be portrayed by HL is played instead by Johnny [... Keep reading]
By Arty Chick, on January 4th, 2010
 I heard about Chéri when it was around, but being in small town USA, it was only here for an instant and I missed it. Fortunately, it is now on DVD and it is a great chick flick, especially for women over 35. 50+ and still ravishing, Michelle Pfeiffer is lovely playing Léa, a courtesan of a certain age in Belle Époque Paris. Rupert Friend (Albert in The Young Victoria) plays Chéri, the 19-year-old son of one of Léa’s old courtesan rivals (Kathy Bates). He has known and loved Léa since childhood, and [... Keep reading]
By Arty Chick, on January 2nd, 2010
 Another post-apocalyptic movie? Seems there can’t be too many of them these days. The difference though with The Road is that it has a real story and isn’t reliant on special effects to tell it. Adapted from the brilliant Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, it stays very close to the book’s original plot. And that may be why it never gets beyond being a good movie.
The Road is a very bleak, very quiet story of a father and son trying to make it to a better, warmer location after some unnamed cataclysm has turned the [... Keep reading]
By Arty Chick, on December 30th, 2009
 To look at The Young Victoria for historical accuracy would be the wrong way to approach it. Screenwriter Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) admits to taking dramatic license in many places for effect. And it is effective as a coming of age love story set inside that gilded cage known as the British monarchy. The story begins with 17 year-old Victoria a heartbeat away from being crowned Queen, as her mother, the scheming Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson), along with her power hungry advisor (Mark Strong) attempt to set up a regency thereby taking power themselves until [... Keep reading]
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