It’s award season. The Academy Awards will be on February 28th, so there’s lots of DVD screeners (“This secure screener is on loan for you, the member. It is not intended for public distribution.”) floating around, which means even the movies currently in theaters have DVD-quality rips out there.
It’s unstoppable, but still, they often watermark each screener that goes out. In this case, the Hateful Eight screener was leaked by Andrew Kosove, co-CEO of Alcon Entertainment - or someone in his office who snagged it before he did.
I saw it yesterday at a theater that didn’t have it’s 70mm shit together. There was a focus issue that they couldn’t quite fix–not quite bad enough to ask for my money back, but it sorta ruined the whole concept of seeing in that format. Other than that, I enjoyed H8–it had all of QTs trademarks and I really liked seeing that cadre of actors working together.
I have been watching screeners for decades…I have connections to lots of Acadamy voters who are casual about lending them out, and I live in Los Angeles.
Now, about the movies…
My personal faves this year are
Room
The Martian
Sicario
But I liked lots of things about others…I think the Oscar season crop is prett decent entertainment overall, dpending on your tastes. Brooklyn was lovely, Bridge of Spies was solid Spanks entertainment (with a marvelous turn by Mark Rylance), Concussion was predictable but Smith did an excellent job with it, Spotlight was a good All The President’s Men style story, etc.
I am generally a pretty big Tarentino fan and I disagree with the OP… It was a totally tarantino film, but all that means is fun dialogue and cartoon violence. I will take Django any day.
[Predator]Hawkins: Hey Billy. Billy! The other day, I went up to my girlfriend, I said, “Y’know I’d like a little pussy”. She said, “Me too, mine’s as big as a house!”
[Billy stares blankly]
Hawkins: See, she, she wanted a little one 'cause hers was…
[Hawkins pauses, then trails off]
Hawkins: … big as a house. [/Predator]
Back to the thread intent:
Yesterday I saw “The Danish Girl” (the movie about the world’s first sex change patient). It was a very well done movie; even at two hours running time, it never felt padded. Eddie Redmayne does a strong job at portraying the lead character’s slow emotional transfomation between being a man and realizing he’s a female, and all the scars it leaves. What really impressed me though was Amber Heard’s role as his spouse. She has an incredibly difficult role, a woman who must stick with her husband through an unbelievable change without ever being a pushover, and does it perfectly.
That being said, if I do see the film again it’ll take a while. The finale is very downbeat and comes sorta out of nowhere. I understand that’s the nature of the story but it does require some emotional decompression time.
That’s actually the rising Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, who will probably receive an Oscar nomination for her role, though in which category no one knows. Some critics groups have put her in Best Supporting Actress, while the Golden Globes nominated her in the Best Actress category. The Oscar voters can put her wherever they want. She’s also getting a lot of awards attention for her role as the AI experiment in Ex Machina. She was also in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. this year which, dammit, I liked a lot, as well as Burnt with Bradley Cooper, which I wanted to see but missed. I’ve liked her ever since 2012’s A Royal Affair, with Mads Mikkelsen, and it’s nice to see her getting attention now. She has 4 movies coming in 2016, including a Wim Wenders film, the next Bourne movie, and two highly-anticipated indie movies, so we’ll see a lot more of her.
Sorry about that, shows I gotta stay til the end of the credits instead of just looking at the poster:) You are right in that she totally deserves an Oscar, although I fear it will be in the Supporting rather than Best Actress (for marketing reasons more than anything else).
You never know. It’s entirely possible for Alicia to be nominated Best Actress for The Danish Girl AND Best Supporting Actress for Ex Machina. That’s what the Globes did. I don’t understand what any of it has to do with marketing though. Actors nominate actors for Oscar and they’re a diverse group of people from around the world. They nominate who they like and don’t like being told what to do. They’re fairly immune to marketing.
Another film from 2015 that I’d like to discuss (or warn people about) is called The Salvation.
I had a very strong negative reaction to this film. I thought it was a very cheesy rip-off of The Hateful Eight. Just like The Hateful Eight:
There is a stage coach trip in the beginning of the film with a lot of violent action and someone is thrown out of the stage coach while it is moving.
The rest of the film is essentially nothing but non-stop bloodshed and gore and mayhem. I can’t recall another film with more bloody violence except perhaps for The Hateful Eight.
But in T.H.E. the violence had a purpose. It was woven into the plot and was actually very entertaining. In The Salvation, it was just violence heaped upon violence heaped upon even more violence and nothing but violence.
There was a plot and I suppose some people might say the lead character was well motivated to do all that violence as retribution for some harm visited upon his family by some thoroughly despicable creeps. But there was just far too much violence and far too little plot for my tastes.
I must admit that after the half way point, I did fast forward through much of the rest of the movie. So it is possible that I may have missed a large part of the film and some people may have found it to be a much better film than I’m making it out to be.
But I was really angry because I thought so much of this film was so similar to The Hateful Eight - all except for the entertainment.
Hey me too. Did Janice change her phone number? Because she said she would lend me the new Star Wars but when I called her I got a males voice as her phone message.
Can’t be…Janice Don’t Give a Fuck, Jon’s anyway, and this one surely does. Super uptight about returning stuff on time. That’s why she bumped DS, got sick of having to call him ten times.