This isn’t late at all, is it? Nope, not at all. Moving on now. Reactions to Rain Man, Children of Men, Pan’s Labyrinth, Curse of the Golden Flower, Possession: A Romance, The Emperor Jones and more after the jump. And the next time I need to procrastinate, maybe I can get February’s done. ;)
Category: Film Page 93 of 101
Here are some of the films I’m looking forward to in the next…year. I haven’t kept up on trailer watching, so these are mostly big releases and many of them are duhs. Oh well.
Embedded trailers and my reactions after the jump. Warning: VERY LONG.
I’ve been struggling to figure out how best to showcase upcoming films–if I use IMDb’s release schedule, it’s sometimes hard to find the trailers. If I use the trailer sites, it’s sometimes difficult to get correct release dates. Even so, how do I deal with limited release films that may open in NY/LA this week, but not go into general release for months, perhaps? What about festival films? I’m still not decided, but the longer I put it off, the more films pass by without my saying anything. And I want to say stuff, dang it! That is, after all, the whole point of blogging. So the inaugural post in the Trailer Watch series is going to be a relatively innocuous look at what’s opening this week. I’ll probably follow in a few hours with a hodgepodge of films coming later in the year that I’m personally excited about.
(This is also an attempt to have something to post regularly, so that I DO post regularly, about something. Just to get in the habit.)
Trailers and my reactions after the jump.
Okay. I was going to live-blog the Oscars last night, but then I decided not to. It was going by pretty quickly, and it was pretty much all my friends and I could do to recover from each unfathomable choice in time for the next one. Okay, to be fair, the Academy got a few right.
I’ll put the rest after a jump for spoilers’ sake.
Kristin Thompson gives her picks for Oscars from 1928 to now.
Rethinking the Oscars is a favorite pastime every year about this time, and Thompson’s got a lot of really good alternates. It’s interesting to note that most of her picks (up until recent years, anyway) are from directors who were either “rediscovered” by French critics of the New Wave (Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Anthony Mann, Samuel Fuller) or came out of the New Wave tradition (Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, sort of Michelangelo Antonioni), or are genre films (musicals, films noirs, westerns, thrillers), which the Academy traditionally hates and were resurrected by the New Wave critics. It just goes to show what a watershed period the New Wave was in film history. In other words, many of the films she chooses would never have been considered by the Academy, because genre films and the directors who directed them (Hitchcock and thrillers, Ford and westerns, Fuller and crime films, etc.) weren’t considered prestigious enough for the Academy. You can also see the Hollywood/foreign film disconnect, as many of her choices are from France, Italy, Japan, etc.
Anyway. I was going to post my own list, but I actually think she’s got it pretty well covered. I might keep Mrs. Miniver over The Magnificent Ambersons (but I would really need to rewatch the latter before committing to that), Casablanca, West Side Story (though she’s probably right…I just LOVE WSS), Chariots of Fire (again, because I LOVE it), Schindler’s List (Groundhog Day? Really? I like Groundhog Day, but not vs. Schindler’s List), and American Beauty. A lot of the 1970s and 1980s ones I can’t comment on, not having seen either the winning film or her alternatives. I might also keep Lawrence of Arabia because it’s gorgeous, but I have to admit that Jules et Jim is pretty excellent. I’d need a rewatch on Liberty Valance.
In addition to being a good alternative Oscar list, it’s also (obviously) a really good list for building film literacy. I’m going to go add the ones I haven’t seen to my Netflix queue. (Speaking of Netflix queues, if any of y’all have Netflix accounts, let’s be friends! faithx5 AT gmail DOT com is my associated e-mail address.)