Orble - mandrake's filmwatch

mandrake's filmwatch

follow this blog

2 daily readers

rank of 6322

E-mail Subscription

Receive an e-mail notification of new posts on this site:

oscar tips

March 7th 2010 12:59

Here's my Oscar tips including a few should win/will win ideas.

Best Picture: Will Win - The Hurt Locker
Should Win - Avatar

The Academy are terrified that if the award Cameron with another best picture Oscar he'll do another "I'm King of The World!" type deal. This time it would be "I'm Torook Mactow!"or "You should see your faces." Quoting himself is not terribly gracious.
But rest assured, awarding The Hurt Locker over Avatar is in the same league as Shakespeare In Love winning over Saving Private Ryan. Not quite the crime that occurred in 1980 when Ordinary People won over Raging Bull, but not far from it.
The Hurt Locker is a good film, but in twelve months time it will be case of "oh that's right - It beat Avatar. What were they thinking?"
Avatar is not just an extraordinary technical achievement; it's not just reinvented how every film budgeted over $40 mill will be made - "Why can't we go a little Avatar with this?"
It's any outstanding film in most every aspect. A great story, well told, brilliantly executed and with more than just a little political observation.
The last reel or act is maybe the most dynamically executed conclusion in years. The last forty minutes is over in an instant, yet it is just long enough, just moving enough, just brilliant.
To think that nine foot blue humanoid computer generated characters can convey that much humanity is stunning. I want to live on Pandora.

Best Actor - Will win - Jeff Bridges - Crazy Heart - Career tribute
- Should win - Colin Firth - A Single Man - Brilliant
Best Actress - Will win/ Should Win - Merryl Streep - Julie & Julia - Heck why not just name it after her? Who wins the Streep award?

Best Supporting Actor- Will Win/Should Win - Christoph Waltz - Inglourious - for regionalising accents in four different languages, but mostly a great performance.

Best Supporting Actress - Will win/ Should Win - Anna Kendrick - Up In The Air - very good, but there's no real standout here. They tend to go a bit unpredictably with this one - as in Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny. Possibly Mon'ique, but my tip for Kendrick. (Vera Farmiga could win for best body-doubled bottom)

Every Technical Award - Avatar - enough said.

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: bruce potter - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

Transformers gets it's own Jar Jar

July 6th 2009 14:22

Spoiler Alert! Only read on if you’ve seen Revenge of the Fallen.
Michael Bay and his team of flare wranglers and low angle slo-mo artists return with a film I’d been looking forward to for some time. I’m so disappointed.
Revenge of the Fallen or Revenge of the Unfunny is a jumbled mass of explosions, chase scenes and slo-mos of hot looking women. It’s too long, under written, and seems to have completely forgotten what made the first film so good.
One of it’s downfalls is offering up one of the most annoying characters since Jar Jar Binks. Ramon Rodriguez plays Sam’s geek roommate and then for some reason goes with Sam on his many adventures. He has no actual part in the action; no importance at all, but pops up in every second scene to panic, scream and get tasered. I wanted to taser myself after twenty minutes.
It’s astounding that a film that moves along at breakneck speed, seems to have very little plot, yet so often I was in a scene and completely lost as to why we were there and where we were headed.
I don’t know how you can manage to have a good strong narrative in the first film, yet completely butcher the narrative in the second. It’s like two different teams made the two films.
Worst of all, THEY FORGOT TO BRING THE FUNNY.
The first film was a cracking good adventure film with a huge amount of laughs. There was maybe one moment where I found myself laughing in this second film. It’s hard to believe that the writers could misfire so far in delivering a movie with none of the wit and charm of the first film.
The other thing that I loved about the first film was that they managed to make you feel for the robots; to generate empathy for a CG character of a robot was quite clever. Not Revenge of the Unfunny. They supply too many robots to make any of them interesting, and the returning robots have barely evolved. Indeed, Bumblebee has devolved into not being able to talk at all, and carrying on like a spoilt brat.
And there are many holes in the script, like how when he was apparently killed in the first film, Glenn Morshower’s “General Morshower” gets to play a pivotal role in Revenge? Or how when Sam and Micallah are racing in Bumblebee to get to the pyramid, they get out and run the last three miles? Or when they’re running from something exploding, Josh Dahamiel, and not Shia Lebouef is holding Megan Fox’s hand? She maybe a gun mechanic, but she can’t seem to run anywhere unless she’s holding somebody’s hand.
These are petty complaints, but they wouldn’t exist if the script had have engaged me.

Revenge of the Fallen is maybe not as crappy a sequel as Terminator Salvation, but it’s fallen well short of delivering on some high expectations.
5/10

Eric Mandrake

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: bruce potter - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

samson and delilah not quite the greatest

June 6th 2009 13:16

David Stratton's fifth star appears only slightly more often than Haley's Comet. For him to leap out and claim that Samson and Delilah is the greatest ever Australian film caused me to spit take my energy drink all over the coffee table. Allow me to illluminate.
Samson and Delilah is a great film. To strip the script of most all it's dialogue and still deliver a gut wrenching tale of heartbreak and heart bleed is a major achievement.
But to defrock Gallipolli, Breaker Morant, Mad Max 2 and Lantana and others of their riteful place as our greatest films for me was a bridge too far.
There were two areas that might have given the film the gravity it would need to topple those films from the altar of Australian greatness.
The first is the musical score; it's virtually non-existant. I understand the psychology of forcing the viewer to emote objectively, rather than have the score seduce them down this path or that. But for a film as sparsely spoken as this one, I felt it needed a score of some sort. For a guide think of Thomas Newman's American Beauty, Peter Gabriel's Rabbit Proof Fence, or Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas. I wanted to embrace the film, yet the lack of a score kept me beyond arm's length.
The second area I wanted differently was the camera work. I understand the practicality of having the director operate his own camera, for an economy of communication and finance.
But as operator there were choices he made that I found jarring. Many of the establishing shots are hand held. When you should be thinking "Oh, that's we are now" I found myself thinking "It can't be that hard to drag a tripod up to the hilltop, can it?" instead.
Also there was some strong images that would have been much more powerful if the tripod had been used and some postcard frame composition used. Think Woody Allen's Manhattan, or The Coen Bros. Blood Simple.
Take the scene where Samson rolls past Delilah and her Nana in the wheel chair. Instead of walking beside them with camera, set it up across from them and have them roll into and out of frame.
And having this style of camera work would lend itself more towards having a stronger score. Make the score third character in the film.
Try those areas and then I think you've really got something.
For me Samson and Delilah gets
9/10
Eric Mandrake

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: bruce potter - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

1 Posts

1 Posts

1 Posts