Category: Movies

The Rotten Tomatoes website, created in 1999, aggregates reviews from hundreds of newspapers and websites across the country, converts each review into a thumbs-up (“fresh”) or thumbs-down (“rotten”) rating, and then combines those assessments into a single “Tomatometer” rating that gives the percentage of positive reviews. The site even aggregates archived reviews from films that were released in the 1990s and before. Whether you’re looking at contemporary cinema or the classics, the Tomatometer can serve as shorthand for a film’s critical reception, if not its box office success.

Christopher Beam and Jeremy Singer-Vine of Slate Magazine have taken Rotten Tomatoes data and made some fascinating tools.

For example:

With that in mind, use Slate’s Hollywood Career-o-Matic tool below to map the career of any major actor or director from the last 26 years. You can also type in more than one name to plot careers side by side. For example, Paul Thomas Anderson vs. Wes Anderson vs. Pamela Anderson. Mouse over the data points to see which movies they represent.

Roger Ebert has written a very personal tribute to a film more than a review. It really resonated with me (we are about the same age). One paragraph:

Many films diminish us. They cheapen us, masturbate our senses, hammer us with shabby thrills, diminish the value of life. Some few films evoke the wonderment of life’s experience, and those I consider a form of prayer. Not prayer “to” anyone or anything, but prayer “about” everyone and everything. I believe prayer that makes requests is pointless. What will be, will be. But I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless routine.

“Natalie danced her ass off.”

Mila Kunis quoted at guardian.co.uk

Over the weekend Portman’s dance double for Black Swan, Sarah Lane, claimed Portman only danced a small proportion of the film. Analysis of the film and statements by director Darren Aronofsky say Portman did 80% of the scenes and 90% of the total time.

“I had my editor count shots. There are 139 dance shots in the film. 111 are Natalie Portman untouched. 28 are her dance double Sarah Lane. If you do the math, that’s 80% Natalie Portman.There are 139 dance shots in the film. 111 are Natalie Portman untouched. 28 are her dance double Sarah Lane. If you do the math, that’s 80% Natalie Portman.

He added: “What about duration? The shots that feature the double are wide shots and rarely play for longer than one second. There are two complicated longer dance sequences that we used face replacement. Even so, if we were judging by time over 90% would be Natalie Portman.”

A better than most brief assessment of Elizabeth Taylor.

Roger Ebert tweeted a link to his 1991 review of Come See The Paradise in reply to being asked if there were any good films about the Japanese-American internment camps.

I have not seen the movie, but the review encourages me to do so. Netflix has the DVD.

The results seemed preordained. “The King’s Speech” is a pudding of a movie, easy in, easy out, and its lack of chew is ideal for those porcelain veneers twinkling in the dark at the Kodak. “The Social Network,” by contrast, requires you to listen, watch, think, which isn’t often demanded of movie viewers. Academy members might be the ultimate film insiders, but there’s no reason to believe that they’re different from most moviegoers, who, used to facile entertainments, have voted for “The King’s Speech” ($114 million domestic box office and counting, as of Tuesday) over “The Social Network” (just under $97 million). Truly, considering the Academy’s track record (“A Beautiful Mind,” ad nauseum), the surprise was that “The Social Network” was even in contention. As a friend said, “If you combine regiphilia with disability, you’ve got a winning ticket.”

From a look at the Oscars and the ceremony by Manohla Dargis of The New York Times.

I thought Colin Firth was superb, but The King’s Speech did not make my top five.

For every year putting together an Oscar ballot with all the nominees for family and friends to make their picks. It makes a fun night all the more engaging, enjoyable and memorable.

(I had a particularly poor showing this year and I still liked picking.)

I thought it was a better Oscar show than most. I thought Anne Hathaway was terrific. And I loved the Staten Island school choir — a portrait of America for sure.

Amazon Prime — $79 a year and already well worth it for the free two-day shipping — now includes video streaming. They’ve got about 5,000 films already available. Nothing much that Netflix doesn’t have, but competition is a good thing. We are not communists.

And besides, it’s free if you already have Prime, and I have for several years.

We watched A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fiançailles) last evening, streaming from Netflix. The 2004 film stars Audrey Tautou as a young woman just after World War I convinced that her fiancé was not killed at the Somme as reported. Among the cast are future and former best actress Oscar winners Marion Cotillard and Jodie Foster.

The film is excellent — wonderfully well-acted, beautifully and creatively filmed, just enough mystery, just enough romance, a perfect ending.

Although France did not submit Un long dimanche de fiançailles for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, it was nominated for the best art direction and best cinematography Oscars. Marion Cotillard won the French César Award for best supporting actress. Audrey Tautou was nominated for the César Award for best actress, one of the three times she has been nominated (the others being Amélie and Coco Before Chanel).

The film is in French with English subtitles.

An interesting assessment of movie production and marketing — The Day the Movies Died. An excerpt:

. . . As anyone in Hollywood will tell you, the American filmgoing populace is divided two ways: by gender and by age. Gender is self-explanatory (usually); the over-under dividing line for age is 25. Naturally, every studio chief dreams of finding a movie like Avatar that reaches all four “quadrants” of the audience: male and female, young and not. But if it can be made for the right price, a two- or even one-quadrant film can be a viable business proposition.

In Hollywood, though, not all quadrants are created equal. If you, for instance, [are a woman], you’re pretty much out of luck, because women, in studio thinking, are considered a niche audience that, except when Sandra Bullock reads a script or Nicholas Sparks writes a novel, generally isn’t worth taking the time to figure out. And if you were born before 1985… well, it is my sad duty to inform you that in the eyes of Hollywood, you are one of what the kids on the Internet call “the olds.” I know—you thought you were one of the kids on the Internet. Not to the studios, which have realized that the closer you get to (or the farther you get from) your thirtieth birthday, the more likely you are to develop things like taste and discernment, which render you such an exhausting proposition in terms of selling a movie that, well, you might as well [be a woman].

That leaves one quadrant—men under 25—at whom the majority of studio movies are aimed, the thinking being that they’ll eat just about anything that’s put in front of them as long as it’s spiked with the proper set of stimulants. That’s why, when you look at the genres that currently dominate Hollywood—action, raunchy comedy, game/toy/ride/comic-book adaptations, horror, and, to add an extra jolt of Red Bull to all of the preceding categories, 3-D—they’re all aimed at the same ADD-addled, short-term-memory-lacking, easily excitable testosterone junkie. . . .

We watched Inception last night, the eighth of the 10 movies nominated for Best Picture this year that we’ve seen.

It was well done and provocative, but it made my brain hurt trying to sort it out.

Today I saw my seventh of the ten films nominated for Best Picture — The King’s Speech.

Magnificent.

And Colin Firth, too.

Both, by far, the best I’ve seen.

Tomorrow, Inception.

The muse is still avoiding me, so just quick mentions of films I’ve seen in the past week.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps — Tuco himself is in this movie, 95-year-old Eli Wallach. The Shia LeBeouf character’s ringtone even plays the theme from Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly), as a tribute to Wallach I assumed. That’s the foremost thought I took from this film, which was an entertaining if unremarkable sequel to the 1987 movie. Michael Douglas reprises the Gordon Gekko character, but this time around, Josh Brolin is the real villain, as bad though a lot slicker than he is as Tom Cheney. Charlie Sheen has a cameo.

Winter’s Bone — I’ve seen five of the 10 best picture nominees so far and this is by far the most engrossing film. Jennifer Lawrence surpasses both Annette Benning and Natalie Portman as best actress and John Hawkes is superb in a supporting role — he too has an Oscar nomination. Set and filmed in the deepest Missouri Ozarks, Lawrence plays Ree Dolly, a 17-year-old raising her two younger siblings. Hawkes plays her uncle, Teardrop, a man in Roger Ebert’s words “whose existence inflicts a wound on the gift of being alive.” Provocative. I rented this movie, but intend to watch it again as soon as it’s available on streaming. Highly recommended.

[Winter’s Bone is the kind of movie that could surprise come Oscar night. I don’t predict it will win anything — though it did at Sundance. I just wouldn’t be surprised if it did.]

Dogtooth — This movie from Greece is nominated for best foreign film. It’s a bizarre tale of a family totally secluded from the outside world by the father, even though the son and two daughters are nearing 20. In one example, they see planes flying high over — the father tosses a toy plane into the yard, and they think it has fallen from the sky. The father brings in an outsider to have sex with the son. Things begin to unravel from there. Very strange.

Tortilla Soup (2001) — Hector Elizondo plays a widowed, middle-aged father with three grown daughters still living at home. Romance and comedy ensue. Paul Rodriguez and Raquel Welch have minor parts, hers mostly silly. The star of this film is the Mexican cuisine — the father is a chef and cooks Sunday dinner at home. For me, the movie did for Mexican food what Chocolat did for chocolate. Entertaining.

Rio Bravo (1959) — One of the best of the genre with John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan and Angie Dickinson (Wayne’s love interest, and, of course, half his age). The sheriff (Wayne) arrests the bad guy (Claude Akins) for murder. The killer’s brother promises to spring his sibling. He sacrifices countless hired hands in the attempt. Dean and Ricky sing.

The Bourne Identity (2002) — The best of the three.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest — Not the best of the three.

Coming up next, Oscar nominees Restrepo and Toy Story 3.

. . . to realize that an individual nominated for an Academy Award was born in 1996? December of 1996 at that.

Hailee Steinfeld was born December 11, 1996. She is nominated for best actress in a supporting role for True Grit. She is in every scene except the last (an epilogue years later).

The actor James Cromwell, who is 71 today, was once nominated for best actor in a supporting role. The part? As the farmer in Babe. If that was a supporting role, who was the lead actor, the pig?

But wait a minute, her defenders cried: Ms. Steinfeld’s character, Mattie Ross, is in nearly every scene, she’s the center of the movie, its clear protagonist!

Not so fast. According to Scott Rudin, a producer of the film, Mattie Ross is an instigator for the behavior of the true star, Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn (he was nominated for best actor). Ms. Steinfeld’s character also doesn’t have “an arc,” Mr. Rudin told Kris Tapley at the In Contention blog — despite undergoing some harrowing ordeals, she doesn’t change. The studio, Paramount, promoted her for the best supporting actress category.

Oscars 2011 – NYTimes.com

Nominees for the 83rd Academy Awards
(Winner’s announced Sunday, February 27th)

Best picture

“127 Hours”
“Black Swan”
“The Fighter”
“Inception”
“The Kids Are All Right”
“The King’s Speech”
“The Social Network”
“Toy Story 3”
“True Grit”
“Winter’s Bone”

Best actor

Javier Bardem, “Biutiful”
Jeff Bridges, “True Grit”
Jesse Eisenberg, “The Social Network”
Colin Firth, “The King’s Speech”
James Franco, “127 Hours”

Best actress

Annette Bening, “The Kids Are All Right”
Nicole Kidman, “Rabbit Hole”
Jennifer Lawrence, “Winter’s Bone”
Natalie Portman, “Black Swan”
Michelle Williams, “Blue Valentine”

Best supporting actor

Christian Bale, “The Fighter”
John Hawkes,”Winter’s Bone”
Jeremy Renner, “The Town”
Mark Ruffalo, “The Kids Are All Right”
Geoffrey Rush, “The King’s Speech”

Best supporting actress

Amy Adams, “The Fighter”
Helena Bonham Carter, “The King’s Speech”
Melissa Leo, “The Fighter”
Hailee Steinfeld, “True Grit”
Jackie Weaver, “Animal Kingdom”

Best director

Darren Aronofsky, “Black Swan”
David Fincher, “The Social Network”
Tom Hooper, “The King’s Speech”
David O. Russell, “The Fighter”
Joel and Ethan Coen, “True Grit”

Best animated feature

“How to Train Your Dragon”
“The Illusionist”
“Toy Story 3”

Best foreign language film

“Biutiful” (Mexico)
“Dogtooth” (Greece)
“In a Better World” (Denmark)
“Incendies” (Canada)
“Outside the Law” (Algeria)

Ex post facto I read a couple of reviews of Black Swan. I guess I am not supposed to have liked it that much.

Though Dan Kois at Slate Magazine certainly likes it:

“[T]here’s a real charge to undergoing the kind of sensation that Black Swan put me through: the feeling that the movie’s going off the rails, and I’m happily going with it.”

And The New York Times’ A.O. Scott likes it even more. And explains it well.

It is after all a horror film.

Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers takes a quick look at the 10 Greatest Roles of Jeff Bridges. You know what’s number one, right?

Elsewhere Travers also lists his top 10 of 2010:

1. The Social Network
2. Inception
3. The King’s Speech
4. True Grit
5. The Kids Are All Right
6. 127 Hours
7. Black Swan
8. The Fighter
9. Winter’s Bone
10. Toy Story 3

Ebert has them:

1. The Social Network
2. The King’s Speech
3. Black Swan
4. I Am Love
5. Winter’s Bone
6. Inception
7. The Secret in Their Eyes
8. The American
9. The Kids Are All Right
10. The Ghost Writer

We saw Black Swan yesterday. I almost didn’t go because vegging in front of some televised bowl game sounded more appealing than going out on a cold day.

But I did go and I was rewarded with an amazing film. Natalie Portman should win that famous gold statuette for her performance as the obsessive, perfectionist ballerina being driven to even more obsessive and perfectionist behavior by her mother (Barbara Hershey, surely also an Oscar contender), the ballet company director (Vincent Cassel) and the perceived competition (Mila Kunis, a long way from “That 70s Show”). Winona Ryder is remarkable as well, as the ballet’s faded star. Portman is, I believe, in every scene, portraying from one take to the next every emotion I’ve ever heard of and some I hadn’t.

A stunning film. A film that you leave wondering what was real and what was fantasy. A movie with a plot based on performance of a story that is itself a metaphor.

And isn’t the point of movies to make you wonder?

Oh, and Tchaikovsky’s music and the ballet were wonderful.

The other day we saw The Kids Are All Right with Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. Bening and Moore portray a couple with children ages 18 and 15. The children introduce their sperm donor into the family and drama ensues — mid-life crises come to even unconventional relationships. Bening especially is superb in this entertaining comedy with serious, but mostly warm undertones.