Archive for January, 2009

So, the Oscar Nominations are in.  You have no doubt seen them by now.  The Awards are set to take place on February 22nd.  I posted earlier about a list of potential nominees with one gripe — I have not seen any of the best picture nominees.  Totally lame, right?  I cannot believe I am missing out on all these great movies.  Even worse, this means that I will need to add to the list of movies we need to watch in less than a month!

Out of curiousity, I wanted to see what films were nominated the most, so I put together this little histogram:

Now, just going be this alone, it seems to tell me that I have not seen the three most awesome movies of the year:  Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, and Milk — not to mention I never saw any of the Best Picture nominees.  Out of the 29 different movies nominated for awards (excluding the shorts, foreign films, and documentaries), I decided to go through the list and figure out how many I have actually seen.  Here it goes:

• The Dark Night
• Doubt
• Tropic Thunder
• In Bruges

Now, only having seen 4 out of the 29 movies is bad.  What is worse, is that 2 of them don’t seem as though they will actually win anything.  Tropic Thunder’s Robert Downey Jr. is nominated for Best Supporting actor, a category expected to be won by the late Heath Ledger.  Plus, this movie was a parody.  And In Bruges is nominated for Best Original Screenplay.  I have to admit, I’m not completely sure who is favored in this category, and I cannot really judge whether I think In Bruges will win, because I haven’t seen the other films.  But I don’t really expect this movie, which was very much a dark comedy, to take this award home.  Judging from the graphic above, I hear Milk was pretty good.

So, I guess that all I can do is to wait and see what happens.  In the meantime, I guess I should watch some more movies…

For reference:

BEST PICTURE
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

BEST ACTOR
Richard Jenkins, The Visitor
Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon
Sean Penn, Milk
Brad Pitt, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Josh Brolin, Milk
Robert Downey Jr., Tropic Thunder
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Doubt
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Michael Shannon, Revolutionary Road

BEST ACTRESS
Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Angelina Jolie, Changeling
Melissa Leo, Frozen River
Meryl Streep, Doubt
Kate Winslet, Revolutionary Road

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Amy Adams, Doubt
Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Viola Davis, Doubt
Taraji P. Henson, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler

BEST DIRECTOR
David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon
Gus Van Sant, Milk
Stephen Daldry, The Reader
Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Frozen
Happy-Go-Lucky
In Bruges
Milk
Wall-E

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
John Patrick Shanley, Doubt
Peter Morgan, Frost/Nixon
David Hare, The Reader
Simon Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
Bolt
Kung Fu Panda
Wall-E

BEST ART DIRECTION
Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
The Duchess
Revolutionary Road

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

BEST COSTUME DESIGN
Australia
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Duchess
Milk
Revolutionary Road

BEST DOCUMENTARY
The Betrayal
Encounters at the End of the World
The Garden
Man on Wire
Trouble the Water

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT
The Conscience of Nhem En
The Final Inch
Smile Pinki
The Witness – From the Balcony of Room 306

BEST FILM EDITING
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Frost/Nixon
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire

BEST FOREIGN FILM
The Baader Meinhof Complex, Germany
The Class, France
Departures, Japan
Revanche, Austria
Waltz with Bashir, Israel

ACHIEVEMENT IN MAKEUP
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Hellboy II: The Golden Army

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Defiance
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire
WALL-E

BEST SONG
Down to Earth, WALL-E
Jai Ho, Slumdog Millionaire
O Saya, Slumdog Millionaire

BEST ANIMATED SHORT
La Maison en Petits Cubes
Lavatory – Lovestory
Oktapodi
Presto
This Way Up

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT
Auf der Strecke (On the Line)
Manon on the Asphalt
New Boy
The Pig
Spielzeugland (Toyland)

BEST SOUND EDITING
The Dark Knight
Iron Man
Slumdog Millionaire
WALL-E
Wanted

BEST SOUND MIXING
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Slumdog Millionaire
WALL-E
Wanted

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Iron Man

I was getting my daily dose of Digg, when I found this article.  It looks like the Academy Awards are scheduled for Sunday, February 22, and will be hosted by Hugh Jackman.  The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will go through with their annual spewing of the nominees this thursday morning, and MovieRetriever.com seems to think they know who will be chosen.

Naturally, my first reaction upon seeing this article was “Oh crap.  This just means that we will soon be one more movie behind on our long list.”  At least I remembered to put the Netflix envelope in the mail today, and we will hopefully be enjoying the next movie on the list very shortly — which will likely be next weekend, since Madison and I seem to have schedules that only involve work and sleep during the week.  Oh, and of course she is in D.C. until late tomorrow night at the inauguration.  Lucky her!  You can see pictures and read of her adventures here.

To get back on topic, I read through their predictions to a little bit of dismay.  Look at their predicted list of Best Picture winners:

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• The Dark Knight
• Frost/Nixon
• Milk
• Slumdog Millionaire

Now, the problem here is that the only movie on this list that Madison and I have seen is The Dark Night.  And while the Dark Night was an excellent movie, I do not predict that this comic book adaptation will take home this coveted award.  Which means that we will most definitely be adding another movie to the list shortly.

As a sidebar, I was happy to see certain predicted nominations, specifically for actors and actresses from Doubt.  Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams are all slated to be nominated in their respective categories for this film.  I went to see this one on New Years Day with Madison and her family, and must say that it was an excellent film.  Meryl Streep was especially amazing in it, and I am happy to see her slated for a nomination.  This was definitely a good film, and worth checking out if you are going to the movies, which is an activity that I would highly recommend in this lame weather we are having right now (winter == lame).  I hope to post again soon with another movie review!

Hooray! We finally watched another movie on the list. Unfortunately, however, this one comes out of order. It turns out Netflix decided to alert us that the DVD was unavailable when it was time to ship. Perhaps by now the DVD will be back in and they can send it to us. If not, I think Madison has found the DVD at a local library so we can borrow it from there. We did not intend to ever go out of order, but we figured for the sake of progress after procrastinating for two months, we should just go ahead.

So, on Friday night, after a delicious smorgasbord of homemade tuna and salmon nigiri, we sat down with a bottle of chardonnay to watch It Happened One Night. The movie carried with it much promise. A little rudimentary research about it on Google revealed that it is referred to as one of the greatest romantic comedies ever. Wikipedia also revealed some other interesting information, including that this was one of the last films shot before the 1930 production code of censorship and the like went into effect.

Immediately we noticed a difference between this movie and ones previous – an ornate DVD label, a visually appealing DVD menu, and clear picture. Clearly, this movie has been digitally remastered to some extent. This would clearly make watching it a little easier on the eyes. On a side note, we really enjoyed a DVD menu without an endless loop of background music. Silence during the menu is something I wish we saw more of – its nice to have quiet when the movie is over, especially if you are not nearby to the remote to shut the television off.

So, the film began, and immediately I was captivated. Clark Gable would be fun to watch, and although we were not familiar with the works of Claudette Colbert, we assumed that she would be awesome as well. As a quick summary of the movie, Colbert plays a socialite running away from home in Florida to marry some d-bag that her controlling father doesn’t like. Gable is a rogue journalist who happens to be on the same bus to New York. He plans to use her as a story in the paper, but just as quickly as you may expect, they start to fall for each other.

The movie was excellent. After it was over, Madison and I discussed at length the movie. One conclusion that we both made, was that this was the first movie that really felt like a movie that we may see on TV today. The character interaction was seamless and natural. There did not appear to be awkward pauses in the dialog – it seemed as though the interaction the characters were having was genuine and not contrived and forced as previous movies had seemed. The characters were also more believable as real people.

The character development was also excellent. Gable and Colbert’s characters grew together throughout the movie. You saw Colbert soften up from the self-confident, almost arrogant reporter he started out as, and Colbert mature from a runaway girl angry at her father to an intelligent young woman.

I was captivated from the beginning of the movie, and enjoyed the entire thing. Gable’s character, Peter Warne, was very likeable and hilarious. This was the first movie where the humor, mostly Gable’s, was something that I laughed at because it was funny. We had laughed in previous movies, but mostly because the jokes were corny and contrived. From the aspiring opera singer and thief that picks them up on the side of the road, to the angry bus driver, to the annoying guy whom Gable tries to present himself as a mobster to, the array of characters they meet along their journey is equally amusing.

If we had been rating these movies as we went along, I suppose this one would be rated as one of the best. I suppose we should be doing something to rate the movies, to make this blog somewhat more useful. I guess that is something we can discuss while we arrange to watch the next movie. Given our busy schedules, I don’t know when that will be, but I will be looking forward to it.

In the meantime, if you are looking for a good romantic comedy to watch, pick up this DVD. It is well worth it.