Voynaristic By Kim VoynarVoynar@moviecitynews.com
Pondering the Contenders in the Best Picture Derby
Published under Oscar Outsider. With ten days to go until Oscar, it’s time for Oscar Outsider to take a look at the Best Picture nominees. Here’s a rundown of the strengths and weaknesses of each of the Best Picture contenders as we come down to the wire … and what the Academy voters might be…
Read the full article »Bridging the Cultural Gulf with Trouble the Water
When is a movie more than a movie? One of the things that particularly interests me about independent film is the way in which movies can both shine a light on social issues and act as agents of change in shifting the way in which those who watch a given film view the world around…
Read the full article »Who’s the Best of the Best Director Nominees?
Here we are 17 short days from Oscar, the “Biggest Movie Event of the Year,” and over on the Gurus chart, they’ve got it nailed down to their top two picks in each category. I’ve written a lot of Oscar columns since coming on board here, covering the adapted and original screenplays, the acting categories,…
Read the full article »Slumdog Millionaire and the Politics of Spin
What is it with the media’s insistence on attempting to spin stories to harm particular films? After enjoying the bounce of positive buzz from the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, solid critical support and a box office take bigger than anyone could have dreamed for a subtitled Bollywood hybrid, Slumdog Millionaire finds itself the target of…
Read the full article »Deconstructing Oscar
Published under Oscar Outsider. Last week, those of us who were at Sundance had to pull our heads briefly out of the myopic world of Fest Coverage and back into the myopic world of Oscar Coverage when the all-important Oscar nominations were announced. Clearly, the people who run the Oscars hate those of us who…
Read the full article »Sundance: It’s a Wrap
In the year of its 25th anniversary, the Sundance Film Festival coincided with the inauguration of a new president who offers hope to a country beaten down by war and a tough economic climate; it’s the first time in my own adult life I’ve ever cared enough about the inauguration to block out time on…
Read the full article »Here We Go Again: The Foreign-Language Oscar Shortlist
Published under Oscar Outsider. The Oscar shortlist for foreign films was announced yesterday, and in spite of the rules changes that were supposed to stop such things from happening, Matteo Garrone‘s Gomorrah failed to make the short list. Really shocking omission, considering the film won the the Grand Prix at Cannes, the Silver Hugo, and has been…
Read the full article »No Regrets: Why Even “Amateur” Films Deserve Honest Reviews
Should film critics differentiate or consider whether a given film is “professional” or “amateur” either in reviewing a film, or in deciding whether a film should even be reviewed at all? There’s been an interesting discussion about reviewing “amateur” versus “professional theater” on The Stranger‘s SLOG between critic Paul Constant and his editor, Brendan Kiley, that seems apropos…
Read the full article »Originality Matters (Page 2)
Published under Oscar Outsider. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, Burn After Reading I’ve written before that I’ve been befuddled by the rather tepid response to the Coen brother’s latest film, which I think is one of their better dark comedies. The Coens are masters at exploiting the flaws and foibles of ordinary characters in extraordinary…
Read the full article »Originality Matters: Considering the Best Original Screenplays of the Year
Published under Oscar Outsider. Spoiler Warning: This column contains heavy spoilers for the films The Wrestler, Happy-Go-Lucky, Burn After Reading, The Visitor and Frozen River. What elements set apart a few screenplays out of all those produced each year from the rest of the pack as we head into Oscar season? All scripts have certain…
Read the full article »When Good Foreign Films Get Bad Remakes
We hear a lot about how American remakes of foreign films tend to be pale imitations of the original, and there’s more truth than stereotype to that sentiment. But are American remakes inferior because they’re made by Americans, or is there an inherent value in the unique cultural perspective of a foreign film that gets…
Read the full article »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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