After reading an interview with Bill Nighy, where he talked up this little-seen British film, I tracked it down, and I’m glad I did. The storyline can seem reductively familiar: the film follows three men in a small coastal British town, each kind of grappling with their own sense of self and their respective love lives, following the funeral of a man close to all. What makes the film stand out–beyond its excellent performances–is its structure (more…)

i’ve been trying to write these reviews for days now. these are troubling movies, not only for what they say about the iraq war and the war on terror, but also for the feelings of identification and alienation they evoked in me.

according to the ground truth, the iraq war’s difference from other wars the US fought consists in the fact that a) the psychological conditioning of soldiers to kill people they don’t hate without inhibition has achieved a phenomenal success, b) the enemy is pretty much indistinguishable from the non-inimical civilian, and c) body armor and surgical technologies save many more lives than in past wars but don’t save limbs, faces, and psyches. what you get is a phenomenal, brutal, free-for-all bloodbath and a lot of seriously damaged veterans. none of this is news to any of us, but filmmaker patricia foulkrod gives these known facts the support of some pretty amazing (and shocking) footage, and a remarkable cast of interviewees. (more…)

Well the big night is here and I haven’t heard a word about it here, nor have I heard anything about an Oscar pool. I attribute it to Arnab’s exhaustion and the fact that the date has been moved up. Some predictions, no better or worse than Bill Murray’s. The Queen will be the suprise winner for Best Picture. why? It has broad appeal, i.e. is middlebrow enough for a general consensus, while the others are too specialized ( Little Miss Sunshine and Babel ), too alien Letters from Iwo Jima ) or too violent/cynical ( The Departed ). Scorsese will win the oscar for Best Director, though this film is the weakest of those he’s been nominated for. Pan’s Labyrinth will be the suprise total winner, getting awards for Best Foreign Film, Art Direction, Cinematography, Makeup and Original Score. It will,however, lose best screenplay to The Queen . Children of Men which should have been nominated for Best Picture will win only Best Adapted Screenplay. Babel gets shut out. The highly touted Dreamgirls wins for Hudson, Murphy and Best Song (it has 3 of the 5 nominations–please god let us not hear them all tonight). The main acting goes as expected–Mirren and Whitaker. Whitaker will give the most unusual speech and Ennio Morricone, winning the lifetime award, will charm as with his broken English, as those wacky foreigners do! Jokes will be….lame. Peter O’Toole will be there drunk and Nicholson will shout out something profane.

Schmabel.

schmabel