'Lessons'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Tropic Thunder (for Downey's performance only, which is brilliant)
The Dark Knight (for Ledger's performance only)
Really? I thought both those movies had more to offer than those performances, great as they were.
What is Frozen River even about? I'd never heard of it until the nominations.
I was really disappointed by The Dark Knight, mostly because it could have been so much better than it was.
Frozen River is about a women raising two kids in a trailer home on the border of both the Mohawk nation and Canada, who gets involved in smuggling people across the border. It is both really touching and very suspenseful. The performances are incredible--Melissa Leo, but also the woman who plays Lila, and especially her older son.
Encounters At The End of the World is also a wonderful movie. Although I'm happy that Man On Wire won, I'd be even happier if Herzog had gotten the award.
Although I'm happy that Man On Wire won, I'd be even happier if Herzog had gotten the award.
I'd have loved to see his acceptance speech, that's for sure.
Hey, I just saw last year's winner this weekend. I am appalled that Tommy Lee Jones didn't get anything for his performance in No Country for Old Men, but he's more of a blue-collar actor than Daniel Day Lewis, I guess.
NC4OM mostly made me the opposite of homesick. They absolutely nailed the environment I grew up in, and it made me really happy to be a fat soft middle-class suburbanite now.
Raq, have you seen The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada? Also very good.
Thanks for the rec! Just added to my q.
R and I are doing the modern-day equivalent of couples' therapy: We are simultaneously going thru Netflix rating movies, each on our own account.
"Ooo! Five stars!"
"No way. I'm not even going to RATE that thing."
"Huh. This one was okay."
"Yeah. Another three star."
"Oh god I hated that piece of crap."
"Really? I gave it four."
New Yorker Films is shut down and its films are being sold off: [link]
I wasn't crazy about The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. It had a few things going for it (Levon Helm's character, for instance), but the story seemed unnecessarily convoluted (and that means a lot coming from me) and I never believed for a second in either Tommy Lee Jones's character or what's-his-face, the twitchy guy who played the border patrol agent. I know Jones was wanting to make a Peckinpah movie - I'm pretty sure I read that Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia was one of his primary influences - but he did the movie wrong by hiring Guillermo Arriaga to write it. That guy overwrites everything he's done: Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel. The location shots at Big Bend were awful purty, though.
Ooh. Criterion is putting out WISE BLOOD in May. Can't wait.