Lisa’s way, way, way, way, way too early Oscar predictions for January

Posted on January 31, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Attempting, in January, to predict what will be nominated for an Oscar next year is a largely pointless exercise but it’s one that I do every year. What can I say? I like the Oscars. I like rituals. And I like making lists.

But seriously, don’t take these predictions too seriously. For the most part, they’re based on wild guesses and familiar names. For instance, The Irishman is listed because it’s a Scorsese film but that didn’t really help out Silence. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is listed because it’s a Tarantino film. Tom Hanks is listed because …. well, he’s Tom Hanks. Late Night and The Report are listed because of the excitement they generated at Sundance but Sundance hype doesn’t always last for a full 12 months. I’d love to see Amy Adams finally win an Oscar for The Woman In The Window but, to be honest, I couldn’t visualize anyone other than Naomi Watts in the lead role when I read the novel.

At this time last year, no one had heard of Green Book. Bohemian Rhapsody looked like it might just end up going straight to HBO. No one suspected Black Panther would be the first comic book movie to be nominated for best picture. Richard E. Grant was on no one’s radar and anyone who says they thought Roma and The Favourite would be the most nominated films of the year is a damn liar. It’s too early to make any sort of real guess about what will be nominated next year.

However, it’s never too early to make some cray, wild guesses!

Here are my way, way, way, way, way too early Oscar predictions for January. Some day, perhaps tomorrow, we’ll look back at these predictions and laugh. And then I’ll cry because it’s never fun when people laugh at you….

Best Picture

A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

Call of the Wild

The Irishman

Late Night

Little Women

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

The Report

Toy Story 4

Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

The Woman in the Window

Best Director

Nisha Ganatra for Late Night

Greta Gerwig for Little Women

Martin Scorsese for The Irishman

Quentin Tarantino for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

Joe Wright for The Woman In The Window

Best Actor

Robert De Niro in The Irishman

Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

Tom Hanks in A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

Joaquin Phoenix in Joker

Brad Pitt in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

Best Actress

Amy Adams in The Woman In The Window

Annette Bening in The Report

Cate Blanchett in Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

Saoirse Ronan in Little Women

Emma Thompson in Late Night

Best Supporting Actor

Harrison Ford in Call of the Wild

Damon Herriman in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

Sir Ian McKellen in Cats

Al Pacino in The Irishman

Wyatt Russell in The Woman In The Window

Best Supporting Actress

Dame Judi Dench in Cats

Laura Dern in Little Women

Nicole Kidman in The Goldfinch

Anna Paquin in The Irishman

Margot Robbie in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood

In Memory of Dick Miller

Posted on January 31, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Dick Miller in Rock All Night

Dick Miller, the legendary character actor who appeared in everything from Apache Woman to Gremlins to The Terminator, has died. He was 90 years old.

Dick Miller started his career in the 1950s and he was still working in 2018. If you’ve watched more than a dozen of movies over the course of your life, chances are that you’ve seen Dick Miller. Maybe you saw him as the friendly flower eater in the original Little Shop of Horrors or perhaps you’ve come across Bucket of Blood, in which he played the homicidal artist, Walter Paisley. If you’re a fan of Martin Scorsese’s, you may have seen Miller in either After Hours or New York, New York. Director Joe Dante loved Dick Miller and found a role for him in almost all of his films. In The Howling, he explained how to kill werewolves. In Gremlins, he provided comic relief. In Piranha, he refused to surrender to a bunch of carnivorous fish.

Dick Miller in The Terminator

But that’s not all. According to the imdb, Dick Miller had 182 acting credits. He played mobsters and he played cops. He played gamblers. He played bartenders and prohibitionists. In his debut film, Apache Woman, he played both an Indian and a cowboy. In Executive Action, he shot JFK. In honor of his first starring role, he played a lot of different characters named Walter Paisley. In Chopping Mall, he was killed by security robots. In The Terminator, he was shot by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Quentin Tarantino claimed that his performances in Grindhouse were meant to be a tribute to Dick Miller. One wonders how Miller would have reacted to that as he wasn’t reportedly wasn’t particularly happy when Tarantino left performance in Pulp Fiction on the cutting room floor.

(Miller discussed his feeling about Pulp Fiction and Tarantino in an interview he did with the AV Club.)

Gremlins

Dick Miller had one of those faces that you couldn’t forget. It was a face that worked just as well for comedy as it did for drama. Miller was originally from the Bronx and some of his best performances epitomized the type of tough, no bullshit, blue-collar worldview that we tend to associate with New York City. One look at Miller and it was easy to imagine him driving a cab and complaining about the Yankees. At the same time, Miller was just as believable when cast as a Nevada sheriff in Far From Home or as a Pennsylvania high school teacher in All The Right Moves. Dick Miller just had it, whatever it may be. When he appeared onscreen, you believed in him. No matter who he was playing, he was real. He was just one of those actors.

After Hours

There was always something comforting about seeing Dick Miller in a movie. Miller appeared in his share of bad movies but he was always good. More importantly, you always knew he was going to be good. As soon as he appeared onscreen, you know that he was either going to elevate a bad film or make a good one even better.

From what I’ve read and heard, Dick Miller was a genuinely humble man who appreciated his fans and whose talent went hand-in-hand with his generosity of spirit. The world of film is going to be a little bit sadder without his presence. The Academy damn well better remember him at this year’s Oscars. Dick Miller’s long career represented everything that there is to love about the movies.

Dick Miller, RIP

The Howling

4 Shots From 4 Films: Basquiat, Love is the Devil, Mr. Turner, At Eternity’s Gate

Posted on January 31, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking.

Today is Inspire Your Heart With Art Day!

Listen, it’s a real holiday. It’s listed on Checkiday and everything. I don’t know who originally decided that January 31st would always be Inspire Your Heart With Art Day. I don’t know how long the holiday has been celebrated. But what does it matter, really? Allowing art to inspire your emotions and strengthen your heart is something that deserves to be celebrated every day!

So, with that in mind, here are 4 Shots From 4 Films, that all have one thing in common. They deal with artists!

4 Shots From 4 Films

Basquiat (1996, dir by Julian Schnabel)

Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998, dir by John Maybury)

Mr. Turner (2014, dir by Mike Leigh)

At Eternity’s Gate (2018, dir by Julian Schnabel)

A Love Letter to STAN & OLLIE (Sony Pictures Classics 2018)

Posted on January 30, 2019 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

I told you Dear Readers I was going to see STAN & OLLIE when it came to my area, and last Saturday night I did just that. Taking the 22 mile trip down the highway to Swansea, MA to catch the 9:40 showing, I have good news and bad news. The good: STAN & OLLIE is one of the best Hollywood biopic I’ve ever seen, a loving tribute to the classic comedy duo. The bad: well, I’ll get to that a bit later.

The film follows Laurel and Hardy as they embark on a 1953 tour of the UK. The duo is older, in need of money, and Stan is working on obtaining funding for their screen comeback – an adaptation of the Robin Hood legend. Ollie is in poor physical condition due to his massive weight gain, but Stan has persuaded him to do the tour. They’re booked into…

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Here’s The Trailer For The Isle!

Posted on January 29, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s always a bit difficult to judge whether a film is going to be good based on its trailer. There have been great films that have had boring trailers. There’s been some really bad films that had great trailers. Just recently, I was way excited to see White Boy Rick, because the trailer was so good. And then I finally saw the movie and bleh. It was bland. It was boring. These things happen.

At the same time, I was also really excited to see American Hustle, again based on the trailer. And then I saw it and I loved the movie even more than the trailer! So, those things happen, too!

With that in mind, though, I do have to say that I really liked the trailer for The Isle. As you can see by watching it below, the trailer is full of atmosphere and hints that this could be a well-done, dreamlike horror film. The trailer itself tosses about comparisons to The Wicker Man and The Witch and, from what they included in the trailer, I can kind of see it. I can also see possible hints of A Field In England, which is also a good thing!

So, with that in mind, here’s the trailer for The Isle. I like it!

Sundance Film Review: Moon (dir by Duncan Jones)

Posted on January 28, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

With this year’s Sundance Film Festival getting underway in Colorado, I’m going to be spending the next few days looking at some films that caused a stir at previous Sundance Film Festivals. Today, I’m taking a look at the 2009’s Moon.

It’s time for all good people to praise Sam Rockwell.

As far as I’m concerned, Sam Rockwell is one of the patron saints of character acting. Is there anything that he can’t do? He can do comedy. He can do drama. He can play the cool, older guy, like he did in The Way, Way Back. He can play the nerdy, weirdo as he’s done in too many movies for me to list. He can play a mentor and he can play a student. He can make you laugh and he can make you cry. He’s one of those actors who can seamlessly transition from small indie films to huge blockbusters without missing a beat. Rockwell won an Oscar for his performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and he might just win another one for playing President George W. Bush in Vice. He can even dance, as anyone who has seen him in Iron Man 2 can tell you. Rockwell’s been acting since he was a teenager and he’s definitely earned the right to be known as one of our greatest actors.

For that reason, it can sometimes be a little bit difficult to decide just which performance is Rockwell’s best. He’s appeared in so many different movies and he’s played so many different characters. Even when the movie’s bad, Rockwell is usually great. However, if I had to sit down and pick one Rockwell performance as being the epitome of everything that makes him a great actor, I’d probably go with his performance in Duncan Jones’s contemplative sci-fi film, Moon.

In Moon, Rockwell plays a man named Sam. Sam has spent three years living on the dark side of the moon. He works for shadowy Lunar Industries. His job is to mine the moon for helium-3, an alternative energy source that is now all the rage on Earth. It’s a lonely job for Sam. He gets up every day. He rides his lunar rover across the stage. He returns to the sterile facility, where he lives. Sometimes, if he’s lucky, he gets recorded messages from his wife and daughter. His only companion is a robot named GERTY. Though Sam trusts GERTY, we know better, if just because GERTY speaks with the voice of Kevin Spacey.

From the minute we meet Sam, we can see how living on the Moon has affected him. He’s quiet and a bit meek. After three years of isolation, Sam accepts whatever he has to accept to survive. He doesn’t complain about rarely getting to talk to his family. He doesn’t question why he has to work alone. Whatever fight Sam once had in him is gone. Now, Sam just wants to finish out his time and go home.

And then, one day, Sam is driving the lunar rover when he has a sudden hallucination and then passes out. He ends up crashing into a crater….

Suddenly, Sam wakes up at the facility. However, it doesn’t take long to notice that this Sam seems different from the Sam who we met at the start of the movie. The Sam who wakes up in the facility is younger and angrier than the Sam who we first met. This new Sam is less willing to accept everything that GERTY tells him. Even more strangely, this new Sam is convinced that he’s just arrived on the moon….

And then the new Sam meets the old Sam….

In Moon, Sam Rockwell gives two empathetic and memorable performances as the same person. Old Sam is beaten down by life. New Sam is angry and just a little bit arrogant. And yet, what makes the performance so brilliant is that you can easily see how the New Sam could eventually transform into the Old Sam. Thanks to both Rockwell’s performance and the film’s stark imagery, it’s easy to see how the isolation could eventually rob Sam of his passion, his will to fight, and his intellectual curiosity. When the Old Sam meets the New Sam, he’s reminded that there used to be more to his life than just the drudgery of his daily routine. And when the New Sam meets the Old Sam, he’s confronted with what a future of isolation means to him.

Of course, the new Sam and the Old Sam weren’t meant to meet. And now that they have met, Lunar Industries is on their way to clean up the mess….

Released in the same year as James Cameron’s bombastic Avatar, Moon is a low-key and thoughtful science fiction film, a meditation on isolation and identity. Duncan Jones directs the film in a stark and low-key style, allowing the film’s story to play out at its own pace. As visualized by Jones, the lunar landscape is impressive the first time you see it and increasingly bleak with each subsequent look. Far more than Ridley Scott did in The Martian, Jones captures what it actually is to be totally alone. (That no critics compared The Martian and Moon, despite their obvious similarities, is astounding to me.)

Featuring Sam Rockwell at his absolute best, Moon is a sci-fi film that remains haunting and powerful, even after films with bigger budgets and flashier special effects have faded into obscurity.

Sundance Film Review: Searching (dir by Aneesh Chaganty)

Posted on January 27, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

With this year’s Sundance Film Festival getting underway in Colorado, I’m going to be spending the next two weeks looking at some films that caused a stir at previous Sundance Film Festivals. Today, I’m taking a look at the 2018’s Searching.

Searching tells the story of David Kim (John Cho) and his daughter, Margot (Michelle La).

David thinks that he has a close relationship with his daughter but, in reality, they’ve been drifting apart ever since David’s wife died two years earlier. Now, Margot is away at college and David is alone at home. They still communicate, of course. They message each other on Facebook. They Skype. David sill sends Margot money for her piano lessons.

And yet, even if he can’t bring himself to fully admit it, David knows that they’re not as close as they once were. Their conversations are often awkward and he doesn’t really know much about the friends that Margot has made at college. Too often, he finds himself starting to ask her about what’s really going on in her life, just to then erase the message before sending. One night, when Margot tells David that she’s going to a friend’s house for a study group, he has no reason not to believe her. It’s not until Margot fails to return from studying that David is forced to confront how little he actually knows about his daughter’s life.

As a film, Searching is set almost entirely on smartphones and computer screens. Considering that the movie could have just as easily been called Unfriended 3: Searching, this is a surprisingly good and emotionally resonant film. We watch as David helplessly sends out messages to his daughters, messages that are destined to be unanswered. We watch as David looks at old pictures and videos of the family he once had, searching for some sort of answer hidden in the past. And, as we watch all of this, we come to realize that David is not just searching for his daughter’s whereabouts. Instead, in a world dominated by social media, he’s also searching for a human connection, for something more than just a tweet or a cryptic status update.

Of course, the film does occasionally threaten to take its format just a bit too far. Sometimes, you really do find yourself wishing that David would just get offline and go outside and look for his daughter. (Actually, he does do that but, because of the film’s narrative structure, we don’t really get to witness it.) By the time David is having nightly FaceTime sessions with the detective (Debra Messing) assigned to his daughter’s case, you can be excused for fearing that the film’s style is going to end up collapsing in on itself.

Fortunately, Searching is held together by the lead performance of John Cho. Whenever Searching threatens to veer into self-parody, Cho is there to bring it back on track. Before this film came out, I guess Cho was probably best known for appearing in the Star Trek movies. Searching made him the first Asian-American to headline a mainstream thriller in Hollywood and Cho gives such a sympathetic and compelling performance that you’re willing to excuse whatever flaws might be present in the film’s narrative. Because he’s played by John Cho, you want David to find his daughter. You want him to find that for which he’s searching.

Creature Double Feature 6: FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN (Hammer/20th Century-Fox 1967)/FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (Hammer/Warner Bros 1969)

Posted on January 26, 2019 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

Hammer Horrors were a staple of Boston’s late, lamented “Creature Double Feature” (WLVI-TV 56), so today let’s take a look at a demonic duo of Frankenstein fright films starring the immortal Peter Cushing in his signature role as the villainous Baron Frankenstein.

FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN was the fourth in Hammer’s Frankenstein series, made three years after EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN. The Baron is back (after having apparently been blown to smithereens last time around), this time tampering with immortal souls rather than mere brain transplants. The movie features some ahead-of-its-time gender-bending as well, with the soul of an unjustly executed man transmogrified into the body of his freshly dead (via suicide) girlfriend, now out for vengeance!

Young Hans (Robert Morris), who watched his father guillotined as a child, grows up to work for muddle-headed alcoholic Dr. Hertz (Thorley Walters , in an amusing performance), who revives the cryogenically frozen Baron…

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Sundance Film Review: Three Identical Strangers (dir by Tim Wardle)

Posted on January 25, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s generally agreed that last year was a great year for documentaries. Between RBG, Would You Like To Be My Neighbor?, and Free Solo cleaning up at the box office, 2018 was the year that proved the audiences were willing to pay money to see reality captured on film. For me, there was no better documentary released last year than Three Identical Strangers.

Three Identical Strangers starts out like a Hallmark movie and then slowly turns into a horror movie. In New York, in the early 1980s, three young men who have previously never met discover that they’re triplets. At first, they’re a media sensation. Young, handsome, and charismatic, Edward Galland, David Kellman, and Robert Shafran become instantly celebrities. We watch archival footage of them appearing on a talk show and talking about how they discovered each other and everything that they have in common. They all smoke the same brand of cigarette. They all tend to have the same fashion sense and interests. All three of them smile while announcing that they’re single and they like women, which causes the audience to break into applause.

It was the 80s and we’re told that meant sex, drugs, and rock and roll. There are the three brothers at a club. There they are walking down the streets of New York, with three huge grins on their faces. There they are making a cameo appearance in a film with Madonna. Soon, they’re opening up a restaurant together, they’re getting married, and they’re starting families of their own….

And yet, as we watch all of this happy footage, we’re also watching present-day interviews with David Kellman and Robert Shafran. It’s impossible not to notice that, in the present, both of them speak in voices tinged with weariness. In the present day interviews, neither one of the brothers smile. Both of them have their guard up. To put it simply, neither one of them appears to be particularly happy.

It’s also impossible not to notice that Edward Galland, who is frequently described as having been the most charismatic of the triplets, is nowhere to be seen.

While the three triplets are becoming celebrities, the families that adopted them are wondering why they never knew about the other brothers. All three of the brothers were adopted through the same adoption agency and, interestingly, all three of them were put into families that had just recently adopted a daughter as well. One brother was given to an upper class family while another was adopted by a middle class family and finally, the third brother was given to a lower class family. It quickly becomes clear that this was not a coincidence.

Instead, the three brothers were a part of a social experiment, one designed to see how growing up at different economic levels would effect them. And, as quickly becomes clear, Edward, David, and Robert weren’t the only part of that experiment. Under the direction of psychologists Viola W. Bernard and Peter B. Neubauer, several sets of twins and triplets were separated for the exact same reason….

To say anything else about this haunting documentary would run the risk of spoiling it. It’s a thought-provoking film, as well as a rather disturbing one. Watching the film, it’s impossible not to mourn for the childhoods that the brothers lost. At the same time, you do find yourself wondering if all of the triplets’s subsequent problems can be blamed on the experiment or if they would have happened even if they all had been raised in the same family? The documentary leaves the answer to that question ambiguous. Much like the triplets, the audience is left wondering what could have been.

Oddly, Three Identical Strangers was not nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. Well, that’s the Academy’s loss because this film was the best documentary of a very good year.

Here’s The Trailer for Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile!

Posted on January 25, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

When I heard that there was a trailer out for the Ted Bundy biopic, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile, this was not what I was initially expecting to see:

Now, if you go over to YouTube and read the comments under this trailer, you’ll see that there are a lot of people who are upset because they feel that the trailer portrays notorious serial killer Ted Bundy as being some sort of hero. While I can understand the concern, I think those people are missing the point.

Yes, the trailer portrays Bundy as being a smooth-talking sociopath who was apparently having the time of his life while killing women, escaping from jails, and fleeing the police. That’s largely because that’s the way that Bundy, in his interactions with others, tried to present himself. That doesn’t mean that the film itself is meant to excuse or make light of Bundy’s crimes. Here’s a statement from MW Film Studios, which was left underneath the film’s trailer:

Seems like a lot of people are missing the point. The reason why the trailer seems to painting him as some charismatic good guy is precisely because Ted Bundy was a very manipulative person who on the surface, one could believe was really that kind of person, but underneath that was someone cold and calculating. Like the person, the trailer is purposely misleading.

Given the fact that this film was directed by Joe Berlinger and any biopic of Ted Bundy would seem to be destined to end with him getting executed in Florida, I am more than willing to give this film the benefit of the doubt. Zac Efron’s appealing but somewhat blank prettiness would seem to make him the ideal pick for the role of Bundy. At the very least, I’ll wait for the initial reviews from Sundance before jumping to any conclusions about whether the film is properly anti-Bundy.

(Incidentally, Joe Berlinger not only directed this film but also Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, which is currently streaming on Netflix. Judging from the docu-series, I doubt Berlinger’s film is going to present Bundy as being anything other than evil and manipulative.)