Y’all…like what in the world has happened to the Oscar race? I mean everything seemed so clear just a week ago and now it’s like the world has gone to hell. I feel like these movies studios came and said fuck your couch and I couldn’t do anything about it. So with all this, I thought I #minuswell update my Oscar predictions. Check them out.
Don Jon, Joseph Gordon-Levitt‘s directorial debut, certainly means well. However just because a film means well doesn’t mean that it’s guaranteed to be a good film and unfortunately for audiences, Don Jon isn’t one. Despite its sterling supporting performances and interesting subject matter, the film feels like little more than an exercise for a man
There’s a war going on in Mother of George, not just among family obligations and societal pressures, but against the very film itself. On the one hand this is movie that tells an engaging story of a couple facing struggles when they can’t conceive a baby. Yet, on the other hand, this is a film so concerned with its visuals and being stylistic that it often gets in its own way. So then how does Mother of George fare in this war? Not well, I’m afraid. Though I want to recommend and champion this movie, the film left me so frustrated and robbed of a good experience that even on the nicest of days it’d be tough for me to give it my blessing.
If you have been following any movie news, you know that 12 Years a Slave, the new Steven McQueen film starring Chiwetel Ejiofer, Michael Fassbender and Lupita N’yongo, is tearing up the festival circuit, inspire all sorts of praise and talk of Oscars. It’s been interesting to see a film made by someone of a dark hue winning raves, but there’s another facet to the conversation surrounding the film that has been confounding me. It all started when Brad Pitt made a comment during a press conference about Americans not asking about why there aren’t more films about slavery and eventually saying that it took an outsider to be able to tell this tale.
Review originally published at Awards Circuit during the Sundance Film Festival.
Kill Your Darlings is a perfect example of how one can tell a familiar story in a unique, fascinating way. Many are familiar with the Beats generation, but the way debut director Johnathan Krokidas and co-writer Austin Bunn see it you haven’t seen the definitive version of the tale till you see their film. Kill Your Darlings is a fascinating sojourn into the origin story of the Beats, kind of like The Avengers: Beats Edition set in the backdrop of the suffocating rigidity of 1944 Columbia University with a sharp script filled with an incredible social commentary. In short, it’s one of the best films I’ve seen so far at Sundance.
Hello everyone, did you have enjoyable weekend? It’s been a pretty busy one for me as film school has really started to pick up. In an effort to catalog my time there (and satisfy a class requirement), I’m gonna be posting interesting things under the tag Film School Files. And what better way to start then by talking about the project I participated in this weekend. Loyola Marymount hosts something called 10:1 Film Rush for the incoming grad students, where we are put into crews, given three words to choose from, and 10 hours the following day to shoot, edit, and screen the movie.