

Voynar 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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »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 »And the Nominees for Best Actress Should Be…
Back in October, I wrote about three performances I feel merit Best Actress nominations this year: Kristin Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved You So Long, Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married, and Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky. Today, having finally seen the rest of the films with Best Actress-contending performances, I’d like to talk about the actresses who should fill the remaining two…
Read the full article »Nudity in Film: Why Bare Chests Do Not Equal Bare Breasts
A while back, I wrote a column here on whether female nudity in film is art or exploitation. One of the things I posited in that column was that the existence of female nudity as such in a film isn’t what determines whether it’s art or exploitation — it’s the context in which the nudity is…
Read the full article »Docs: Poetry Vs Prose
Published under Oscar Outsiders. I am a serious doc geek — the kind who would bore you stupid on a date dissecting some fascinating doc about Bulgarian toe fetishists. And sadly, I’ve just not been blown out of the water much by the docs this year. Maybe it’s the tightening of the economy overall making…
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