

Columns By Kim VoynarVoynar@moviecitynews.com
It’s Raining Men: Which Men Should Get Oscar Nods… and Which Men Shouldn’t
Published under Oscar Outsider. This week, we only asked our Gurus to vote on Best Picture, but as the resident Oscar outsider, I’m still working my way up to that category. I’ve delved deeply into the various adapted screenplays I was most interested in, and have covered the women quite extensively, so this week I’m…
Read the full article »The Top Ten DVDs and BDs of 2008
With the elimination of a competing format, 2008 saw the establishment of the backwards compatible Blu-ray (BD) system as the high-end subset of the DVD format. While it is less flexible and does not offer significant improvements in supplementary features (except enhanced interactivity and an ability to connect with other fans of a title online),…
Read the full article »The List
It’s always difficult to put a year-end list together and it always makes me a bit saddened by the fact that some films have inevitably fallen through the cracks and will go unseen by me. As usual, I plowed through over two hundred films this year, but I still haven’t seen all the ones I…
Read the full article »Taking a Wrong Turn on Revolutionary Road
Revolutionary Road is not a story about suburban angst; it’s a story about the illusions people create to sustain their belief in who they are and who they wish they were. Lee Siegel, writing for The Wall Street Journal, has a piece up titled “Why Does Hollywood Hate the Suburbs? America’s Long Artistic Tradition of Claiming Spiritual Death…
Read the full article »Christmas Caroling with Marley
The other Marley — Marley and Me — proved no Scrooge at the box office with an estimated $51.5 million gross that barked to the top of the box office charts for the four-day seasonal span. In what was technically a box office record-breaking frame, four other films bowed on Christmas day to primarily upbeat…
Read the full article »The Eye of the Navel 2008
(Something Like a Top 10 List) Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Compiling a “best of” list reflects one’s mood on the day of doing the deed. The films most recently seen are advantaged because one’s had less time to ruminate about their qualities. Today I’m feeling more magnanimous than usual and have…
Read the full article »‘Tis the Oscar Season

December, once cherished for its singular place on the religious calendar, now serves primarily as a month-long orgy of conspicuous consumption and glorification of dubious cultural achievements. A tiding of comfort and joy has been drowned out by gifting concerns, and, in in the western precincts of Los Angeles, at least, anxiety over box-office tallies,…
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button plus reviews of Valkyrie, Bedtime Stories, and The Spirit
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Three-and-a-Half Stars) U. S.; David Fincher What a refreshingly “uncommercial” big-budget project! And what a surprisingly enjoyable movie.
Read the full article »Consider the Source: Defining a Dramatic Structure for Defiance
Published under Oscar Outsider. Spoiler Warning: This column contains heavy spoilers for the film Defiance. Adapting a scholarly tome into a dramatic narrative retelling for the big screen is no easy task; how does one take a detailed, rather dry account of historical facts and translate that into a movie with character arcs, dramatic flow…
Read the full article »Wall-E
The lovely 2008 Pixar feature about a robot who rescues humanity, WALL-E, has been released by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment. With minimal dialog but plenty of sound effects and music, the 99-minute computer-animated film depicts the robot cleaning up the trash on Earth left after all of the people have long since departed (in Disney…
Read the full article »Conflicting Messages About Sex with Teenagers: The Reader vs. Towelhead
I wrote about The Reader in my review last week, but I wanted to delve a little more into what I consider one of the more interesting aspects of this film: that it centers around a sexual relationship between a 15-year-old boy and a woman who’s more than twice his age — and that not a…
Read the full article »The Big Chill
The battle of the stars pitted debuts of Jim Carrey in the comedic Yes Man against Will Smith in the three-Kleenex yarn Seven Pounds with laughter prevailing. Yes Man emerged from the weekend with an estimated $17.9 million to top the session charts, with Smith’s weighty affair ranking second on box office of $15.2 million….
Read the full article »Matteo Garrone Director of Gomorrah

This week Noah talks Matteo Garrone, director of Gomorrah, about Italian mafia, Italian cinema and the conventions of the American gangster movie. Listen to Noah Forrest Podcast with Matteo Garrone
Read the full article »The Wrestler plus reviews of Seven Pounds, Yes Man, Frost/Nixon, Amarcord and Moscow, Belgium
The Wrestler (Three-and-a-Half Stars) U.S.; Darren Aronofsky So the French were crazy for liking Mickey Rourke, huh?
Read the full article »Consider the Source: The Adaptation of Revolutionary Road
Published under Oscar Outsider. Spoiler Warning: This column contains heavy spoilers for both the book and film Revolutionary Road. In adapting Richard Yates‘ 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, screenwriter Justin Haythe faced the challenge of translating a book that’s largely interior and told from the point of view of one character, Frank Wheeler (played in the film by Leonardo…
Read the full article »The Frenzies
It seems everywhere you look these days, there’s some different group of folks that are handing out awards to films and actors that they feel are the ‘best’ in a particular category. I figured that I might as well start giving out some awards of my own in different sorts of categories that you might…
Read the full article »New Moon’s New Director: Does it Really Matter that He’s Not a Woman?
I wrote briefly on Film Essent the other day about the Twilight series getting a new (male) director, but I wanted to address it in a bit more detail here. Twilight, in case you’ve been living under a rock the past six months or so, is a wildly popular book series about a teenage girl who falls…
Read the full article »The Day the Box Office Stood Still
A sturdy debut estimated at $31.4 million for The Day the Earth Stood Still wasn’t enough to stave an overall box office downturn as 2008 creeps toward closure. The session also featured an okay bow of $3.7 million for the seasonal Nothing Like the Holidays, which ranked sixth in the lineup. However, it was no…
Read the full article »John Patrick Shanley

This week Noah chats with writer/director John Patrick Shanley about his new film Doubt, his last film Joe Versus the Volcano, working with Meryl Streep, and the wonder of Sabu. Listen to Noah Forrest Podcast with John Patrick Shanley
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Gran Torino plus reviews of Doubt, Nothing Like the Holidays, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Dark Streets
Gran Torino (Four Stars) U.S.; Clint Eastwood Clint Eastwood plays a Dirty Harry grown old in his latest movie Gran Torino. And he makes us feel lucky … to be watching him simmer and explode on screen again.
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