the groundhog day project

To think, I only managed yesterday to get through the first three paragraphs of Mary McNamara's Los Angeles Times piece--"Oscars 2016: It's time for Hollywood to stop defining great drama as white men battling adversity." And the first paragraph was just one line. Meanwhile, I've got a screener of Spotlight playing right now. Immediately, I notice the music. Spotlight isn't nominated for Original Score. It is nominated for Best Picture, of course, which is why I'm watching it again this week. It's also nominated for Film Editing, Original Screenplay, Director Tom McCarthy, Supporting Actress Rachel McAdams and Supporting Actor Mark Ruffalo. I've seen a few people and at least one of the articles in this stack in front of me (but I'm not seeing which one at the moment) complain that Ruffalo just puts on an accent. I'm more impressed by his performance, I suppose. It feels like much more than just an accent. He's got a different dem...

Sometimes, I just can't mince words. The Big Short made me angry. Not because it was a bad film. Far from it, in fact. The ensemble is great, Steve Carell giving the best performance probably, Christian Bale a close second (though Brad Pitt has the best moment in the film). The film makes use of clever voiceover--take note, Danny Rubin --and deliberately bazaar (and out of context) celebrity cameos to explain confusing investment terminology. And, it does a great job of mixing some documentary-style montages to offer up context as to the timeline of events. It tells the story of Inside Job in a simpler fashion, and expands Margin Call 's story into a larger setting. If you don't know either of those films, the former is a documentary, the latter a scripted film, and both are about the financial crisis of 2008. The Big Short begins a few years earlier, when Michael Burry (Bale) basically creates the "credit default swap" and banks let him buy a whole lot of them...

Imagine it: last December, I was watching Christmas movies for this blog. It was nice and pleasant... Well, there was Black Christmas (with a brief venture into Silent Night, Deadly Night , but mostly it was... Nice. There was talk of filmmaking and screenplay structure and Christ-Figures, but mostly it was about how good people can and should be to one another. Or, at least, that is how I remember it. How I choose to remember it. And, the year before, when I was stil watching Groundhog Day every day, I also squeezed in a silly little Christmas film-- 12 Dates of Christmas . This year, I find myself inclined toward more serious fare, toward lengthy rants like the other day . To be fair, December usually includes a lot of the more interesting movies for me since that is when Oscar hopefuls show up in theaters. This year, as well, there is a.... What shall I call it? There is an interesting political climate about in America. Donald Trump is still going strong in his campaign for ...