February 2012
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final oscar predictions.
B1: the artist takes fucking everything. jean dujardin breaks silence to ask "...and what?". everyone goes to get drunk and watch melies pictures at marty's.
B2: alex payne accepts award for screenplay, gives speech on how pain is no less real in hollywood. "oscar prestige can go fuck itself". terrence malick disrobes invisible cloak to be revealed standing behind him, nodding in approval.
B2: lighthearted opening skit breaks the ice, featuring rooney mara tattooing 'i'm a homophobic pig' on brett ratner's chest before shoving a lubed-up oscar statuette up his arse.
B1: ryan gosling turns up, hammer in one hand, bullet in the other.
B1: michael shannon wonders if anyone has yet caught wind of that storm?
B1: michael bay rollicks in, pom poms in tow, fingers crossed for his sound designer.
B1: everyone wonders whether the artist can be both indie spirit and mainstream spirited.
B1: everyone wonders what "a better life" is.
B2: jude law works furiously in the back room, fixing oscar statuettes.
B1: jonah hill wonders where his other other seat is.
B2: jessica chastain's year catches up with her, sleeps through ceremony.
B2: pixar drive a giant rusty tow truck through stage, injuring hundreds.
B1: kristen wiig shits in basin when the Comedy genre's only shot at oscar glory, original screenplay, goes to "a separation"
B1: glenn close arrives with prosthetic penis, wonders if she'll have more of a chance in Best Actor category, where Meryl Streep will never show up.
B1: asa butterfield wonders whether it's normal for films he stars in to not be about him by the end.
B2: tom hanks interrupts presenters with old toy story quotes from the back. asked to leave.
B1: christopher plummer is seated next to max von sydow. realises max is his swedish doppleganger.
B2: "and best picture goes to... there's a snake in my boots!"
B1: scorsese gets comfortable. hasn't prepared a speech. business as usual.
B2: extremely loud and incredibly close has its best picture nomination reel played. no one applauds.
B1: kavinsky & lovefoxxx's "nightcall" plays by accident as terrence malick wins best director. awkward silence.
B2: all statuettes are replaced with golden fass-boners.
B1: viggo mortensen arrives. asks academy to tell him about their Mothers.
B2: academy play a "recently deceased" tribute. includes robert de niro.
B2: tilda swinton drives to academy members homes, tars them with red paint.
B1: spielberg arrives, heads straight for his gold-encrusted throne at the kodak. is politely told the academy were only keen on the horse this year. by john williams.
B1: emma watson ponders nipslip to gain the harry potter franchise some real category legitimacy.
B2: halftime sponsor break advertises The Help DVD on half price at Best Buy.
B1: paul haggis arrives irrate at Help producers, claiming to have solved racism six years ago.
B2: spielberg doesn't show. reports of decapitated horse head found in his bed.
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melbourne cinémathéque – elia kazan: the outsider.
having missed the opening to this year’s three week kickoff to the cinémathéque season (featuring kent jones & scorsese’s a letter to elia), i was glad to have cottoned on to the fact that we were back up and running in time to catch a double-hander of elia kazan’s two most seminal films.
a streetcar named desire [kazan, 1951]
streetcar swept the academy awards in...
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Watch… and part two.
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Watch
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open pits, ready for the lickin'.
in a film brimming with heated back-and-forths, it’s a monument to the microcosmic capacity of andrew haigh’s weekend that both of the film’s polar leads can function as director mouthpieces. the inner tensions of homosexual life are still ever-present as cultural, communal and individual frictions, and haigh spreads that amalgam of incongruous perspectives over the tapestry of...
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and the string of belated reviews continue...
possibly the most surprising aspect of drake doremus’ modest, grand-jury winning love-story like crazy triumphing over sean durkin’s unforgettable cult-flick at last year’s sundance lies in the essence of what exactly the jury were validating with their decision: teen romance is serious business. euphoric montages, brash impulsiveness and ill-advised L-bombs have never been the easiest of phases...
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yeah man... shake the camera some more, looks more...
it’s somewhat a feat in itself that a clever stylistic innovation (or gimmick: take your pick) has traversed the fad-strewn wastelands of popular culture to arrive at recurrent, semi-credible genre (or has it?), but perhaps the greater challenge any ‘found-footage’ film will face is traversing the equally precarious terrain of its own design. josh trank’s shaky-cam-superhero-flick chronicle...
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the year that was (5/5): top 10 films of 2011.
we’re so sorry, tomas alfredson. (and sean durkin, it was like being brainwashed and raped against our will to have left your film off, too).
#10. le havre [dir. aki kaurismäki].
it’s been a long time since miff in july, when i saw aki kaurismäki’s bitterly-but-not-overly sweet le havre, and it’ll be a longer time still before others get the chance to see it in a wider...
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fuck you, you fucking fucker.
why? – the main Q. on everybody’s lips post-announcement of a hollywoodized all-the-rape-no-subtitles re-treatment to stieg larsson’s worldwide literary phenomenon, especially since there already was an internationally beloved, barely-two-year-old swedish language adaptation to its credit. and why is still a pretty relevant inquiry to make in our financially-motivated age of hyper-reproduction,...
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the saddest circus you'll ever see.
a seasoned agent lured from retirement to unveil a hidden traitor doesn’t necessarily read like the set-up for cold, existential drama but such was the heart of john le carre’s lauded spy novel tinker tailor soldier spy; the grandfather to swedish helmsman tomas alfredson’s latest cinematic adaptation of chilly austerity. while gary oldman’s reticent george smiley was always the clear...
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would give my left nut to see this... →
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the year that was (4/5): top 10 performances of...
the looseness of the category- and hierarchy-free format for last year’s performances recap, we felt, worked. so without further ado:
emily browning, sleeping beauty.
stripping down to let old nude men touch you is enough to deserve any actress a firm commendation, yet it was just as often that which emily browning didn’t show us that got under the skin. delivering an intentionally...
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the year that was (3/5): top 5 cinematic moments...
our picks for the best scenes or sequences from the ‘11 litter, packed with hyperbole and unnecessary spoilers.
#5. sticky gloves on the burj khalifa, mission impossible: ghost protocol.
it takes a little something extra to inject genuine tension into any self-contained entry of an action franchise, but that was specifically what brad bird pulled off with his taut, jittery midpoint...
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theron, adding another piece of work to her...
the last time wunderkind director jason reitman hooked up with stripper-turned-screenwriter diablo cody, the offspring was juno — that wildly popular, hipster dramedy partially responsible for boosted sales of hamburger phones, michael cera damning himself to eternal typecasting hell, and jason reitman’s only real dalliance with sickly-sweet sentiment to date. no doubt there’s still a...
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start spreading the news.
acclaimed visual artist steve mcqueen’s follow-up to hunger – his bold, bizarrely stylish hunger strike movie from 2008 – is another powerfully evocative single-barreler: shame, the bold, bizarrely stylish plight of sex addict brandon sullivan [the ever-gripping michael fassbender] in the contemporaneous melting pot of manhattan’s urbanite professionals. that this time ‘round...
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tom hardy, summed up in a single image.
the critical sphere was awash with comparisons between david o. russell’s the fighter and gavin o’connor’s warrior as soon as the latter hit screens late last year, and indeed, both are bruising fighter films strewn over cores of discordant, brooding familial ties. yet while there’s enough likeness to invite correlations, where they differ most is within the chronology of their layers: the...
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January 2012
47 posts
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the year that was (2/5): top 5 one-sheets of 2011.
#5.
#4.
#3.
#2.
#1.
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the year that was (1/5): top 5 quotes of 2011.
#5. ‘you read my diary?’
‘at first i did not know it was your diary. i thought it was a very sad handwritten book.’
— annie (kristen wiig) and brynn (rebel wilson).
[screenplay by kristen wiig & annie mumolo]
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#4. ‘i don’t want to just be theoretically gay. i want to do something about it.’
— hal (christopher plummer).
[screenplay by...