Tag Archives: Oscars

Inception – Movie Review

You’re waiting for a movie, a movie that will take you where no other movie has taken you before… Inception is that movie. To say this is a brilliant movie would be a gross understatement.

Rising to the status of a cult-hit in mere months, this is beyond a doubt the movie of the year. Regardless of whether the later hype of other movies didn’t help its award chances, this is the movie that will forever remain in the minds of audiences. Sort of like last year’s Avatar. This is the movie highlight of 2010.

Written and directed by the amazing Christopher Nolan (and I mean, is there a Christopher Nolan movie that you have not really liked or come to appreciate?), Inception tells the story of a time when accessing people’s dreams to obtain information is a possibility. Cob, portrayed by the brilliant and under appreciated Leo DiCaprio, is a dream architect who is haunted by his own subconscious represented by his deceased wife, Mal (think French with the name), portrayed by the breathtaking Marion Cotillard. Accused of killing his wife, Cob is offered the chance to go back home to his children on the condition that he pulls something that was never done before – plant an idea inside the head of a business giant’s son to break down his father’s empire; hence, the title: Inception. To do this, he must get together a team that will help him pull off this multi-layered dream construct.

The movie might be about dreaming but you need to be fully awake to comprehend what’s going on. I believe the reason Inception is not getting adorned with the awards it deserves is basically because the award personnel did not understand it or found it too complicated. However, a movie of this magnitude deserves much more than the technical awards it’s scarcely receiving. Not to give Christopher Nolan a nomination for his direction is an abomination and he doesn’t look like a favorite for the original screenplay he wrote as well.

Regarding the acting, Inception’s strength is in the collective work of its whole acting body. All of the actors and actresses in this movie are helping the main character, Cob, to find salvation through this dream into the subconscious. The interactions between the characters themselves and between them and their surroundings are truly marvelous, a simple manifestation of the brilliance of the screenplay and director moving them.

The special effects in the movie are top-notch and some parts are reminiscent of The Matrix. The movie bends around the laws of physics like child’s play  and somehow manages to convince you that all of this makes sense.

The soundtrack, composed by Hans Zimmer, is also my favorite out of all the movie soundtracks released this year. My favorite track on it “Time,” a musical composition that I believe is absolutely stunning. Another notable track is “Dream Is Collapsing.” Listening to the soundtrack, it flows very smoothly and  feels like it’s one part it’s separated into tracks. The inspiration for it was “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” by the great Edith Piaf.

Overall, if you haven’t watched this then what are you still doing reading this?

 

Harry Potter Honored At The BAFTAs

I posted earlier about the Harry Potter movies were set to be honored at the BAFTAs for outstanding contribution to British Cinema.

The BAFTAs took place earlier today. Here’s Harry Potter being honored. What can I say? Beautiful speech, beautiful introduction, beautiful montage and awesome people!

I hope Warner Bros. has it up its sleeve for a massive Oscar campaign for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2.

Winter’s Bone – Movie Review

This 2010 drama, set in the Ozarks Mountain in the U.S. is the story of a community that is deeply rooted in the manufacturing of amphetamines. This is the story of a rural community where keeping your mouth shut is the first commandment.

The director of this movie, Debra Granik, lived for a while in those communities. So it’s only natural that her representation of the community in this movie feels real. It’s bleak, dark, haunting… She shows the poverty, the patriarchy, the holiness of family and everything that this holiness entails, the rural aspect of it in such a brilliant way that at times you feel like you’re watching a documentary about the region. Even the accent was perfected by the actors and actresses that you forget this is actually a quest, more than a community presentation.

The movie stars Jennifer Lawrence, a brilliant newcomer, as Ree Dolly, a girl who’s the only caregiver of her mother, there in body only, and two siblings. She drops them out of school, teaches them to hunt and care for themselves, just in case… Her dad, Jessup, has gone missing and in order to keep her house and property, she needs to find him – dead or alive. Or else she’ll lose everything.

Now insert this in a community that is, the least you can say, non-helpful and very rigid about following the aforementioned first commandment and you get a movie that is thrilling, haunting and deservedly so, nominated for best picture as this year’s Oscars.

Everything in this movie is vicious. Even the moments of silence in it are terrifying. You don’t know what the people of this secluded community would do to harm Ree. And you can’t but feel what Ree is feeling, as the 17 year old girl trying to keep it together.

Jennifer Lawrence is epic in this. She’s my favorite acting performance of this year as the girl who, on her path to find any information about her dad, she will go through everything you don’t expect a 17 year old to live through. She portrays this role with a resilient stubbornness, indicative of the hardships she has gone through but she lets you in certain moments glimpse at her soul. There’s one scene, in a boat, that will leave you shaken to your core. When you watch it, you’ll know.

On her quest in this patriarchy, she must go through the wives, not the men. And the wife portrayed by Dale Dickey is a brilliant contrast: ice-cold, non-caring but human. Ultimately, this is the whole society. Even Ree’s uncle, played by John Hawkes, is at the same time ruthless but loving.

All in all, if you’re up for a movie that is deep, cold, dark and haunting, this is the movie for you.

Rabbit Hole – Movie Review

 

Rabbit Hole is an understated and well-written drama that is centered around the ordinary. Ordinary life troubled by an event. It is the story of a family coping with a tragedy.

Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart are a happily married couple. At least that’s the case until their four year old son dies. The movie is not about the son. Most mentions of the son do not come until later in the movie (how he died, his name…). This is the story of this man and woman coping – or lack thereof – with the loss of their only child.

In my head, the plot is cliche. Parents lose child, etc. But what makes this very credible is how convincingly Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart pull off the grieving parents. Each one of them portrays their coping mechanims so perfectly that you’d think they really lost a child. Some say they plot is undercooked. While you can easily see it that way, I don’t think this is what the movie promises to begin with; the promise being the “unusual” that we have come to expect from movies. This movie is rather the usual and how this usual can be made into a cinematic picture.

The movie is this slow progression of everyday life that is so ordinary that at some points, it takes your breath away. There is one particular scene involving a fight between Kidman and Eckhart that is very raw, credible, real.

There are many actors and actresses that make this movie what it is. Aaron Eckhart holds his own with his multi-layered character. But the movie’s centerpiece is Nicole Kidman, up for an Oscar for her role.

She is so astonishing in this movie that it’s very hard to think this is the actress everyone thought was past her prime. She shines as the woman trying to excise her grief, be it with her interactions with the support group or her mother… It’s hard not to applaud her fragile ruthlessness. And that’s precisely what she is: hell-bent not to feel what she’s feeling that she sets off on the most peculiar of paths: getting to know the cause of her son’s death.

This movie is based on a Pulitzer-winning play also titled Rabbit Hole. While I haven’t seen the play, I think it would have been a really interesting event to attend.

And in case you’re wondering why a movie about grieving parents is titled after an Alice in Wonderland term? Well, the way I see it: they are like Alice, wondering a world that feels so strange to them after their son disappeared from it… into a rabbit hole.

Black Swan – Movie Review

Black Swan is a new psychological thriller, brought to you by Darren Aronofsky, starring Natalie Portman as a perfectionist ballerina who lands the main role in a remake of “Swan Lake”.

“Swan Lake” is basically a ballet about a princess who falls in love with a prince, only to be turned into a white swan. To get rid of the curse, she needs to find true love’s kiss. However, the prince she loves is seduced by the black swan and the white swan ends up killing herself. Usually, the swan parts are played by two different actors. But in Black Swan, the director of the struggling ballet institute wanted to have the same person play both roles, possibly to show the dueling sides of humanity. Natalie Portman’s character, Nina, excels at being the White Swan. But her frigid, perfectionist self makes it hard for her to be the Black Swan, seductive and darkly sensual. The movie is her becoming the Black Swan.

As many of you know already, Natalie Portman is getting major award buzz for her role in this. She has won almost every award this season for her role in this movie and deservedly so. She gives an intense, haunting performance of a girl breaking out of her shell on so many levels that she’s not herself anymore. The movie itself can be considered simply as Portman’s vehicle. She is the fragile ballerina who is, for lack of better words, losing it. And she loses it perfectly.

I remember sitting dumbfounded after watching this. I haven’t watched it since. But it’s one of those movies that leave you in shock by the end. You don’t want them to end. You want to see what happens next, what kind of twisted psychological game Aronofsky has up his sleeve. And this is exactly what this movie is. A huge twisted psychological maze that is so open to interpretation that my friends and I cannot even agree on who the villain in this movie is, if there’s a villain in the first place. Some say it’s Nina’s mother – a woman who had to give up her dreams of becoming a ballet icon to raise her daughter and is now trying to live her dream through Nina – or Nina herself, with her Black Swan alter ego.

Others say that it’s Lily, the character portrayed by Mila Kunis. Lily is a newcomer to the ballet institute and she can be the perfect Black Swan. She doesn’t worry about the perfection of her moves, she doesn’t care about anything basically. She just lets go. And soon enough, Nina begins to feel threatened by Lily. Or is she?

Mila Kunis gives a pretty remarkable performance. She did not get an Oscar nomination for her role, although she got a golden globe nod and lost to Melissa Leo.

All in all, this is a movie with acting of extraordinary power. And if the hair on your neck don’t stand up when the last movie of the movie comes up, then there’s something really wrong.