Category Archives: Oscars

Feb 29 2012
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Movies, Oscars, THINGS WE LOVE

This Means War: Why We Actually Go See Movies

Ladies and gentlemen, after seeing the thought-provoking movie, Chronicle, and sitting through (part of) seriously one of the most boring Oscars of all time, we decided to go back to our roots and see a good old fashioned romantic comedy: This Means War. It was so satisfying. Not only is it your pretty standard RomCom (with some action thrown in the mix), it is one of the most unabashedly bad movies of the year… so bad that it is almost… good? Check out the trailer!
Just kidding folks, it is not actually a good movie, but it is a lot of fun to see. It fulfills pretty much all movie stereotypes in the most awesome way possible and shamelessly panders to the lowest common denominator. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, which is why it is the perfect antidote to the stuffy 2012 Academy Awards where we got to watch a silent film take home 5 Oscars and where Meryl Streep winning an Oscar was the only upset. Since when is Meryl Streep winning any sort of award a surprise? Ever???? But we digress….

Anyway, we bring up the Oscars because if we remember correctly, there were all these really boring interviews of famous actors where they told you why they go to the movies. Blah blah blah… Celebrating cinema!…. whatever… boring. But it got us thinking… why do we go to the movies? Certainly not to see The Artist. And then we had an epiphany, it is movies like This Means War that actually inspire us to pay ten dollars and see a movie in theaters! Why? Because they give us exactly what we want. Thank you This Means War for reminding us why America loves movies.

Why We Actually Go to the Movies:

  • Attractive People: Guys. Tom Hardy is SO HOT. Also Chris Pine and Reese Witherspoon! This cast was unbelievably good looking.
  • To See the Good Guys Beat the Bad Guys: The bad guys in this movie were really bad. For starters, they were German. This is made obvious to the viewer because of their scary accents and names (Heinrich and Ivan). They also dressed in all black. And guess who the good guys were? That’s right. The American and British guys. WINNING. Also, the American CIA Agent’s name was FDR. Coincidence? We think not.
  • Reformed Bad Boys: This character is a standard in the RomCom genre. Needless to say, one of our super sexy spies is a womanizer with trust issues. (Shocker!) We all learned long ago that good guys are boring. Unfortunately in the movie, Reese Witherspoon agrees.
  • To See the “Mess” of a Girl Still Get the Guy: Okay, so admittedly, Reese Witherspoon is way too hot to be playing a girl who has such bad luck with guys, but she tries. They tried to make her seem more like us average looking mortals by making her do things like: wear her gym clothes out in public (still looked pretty), sing along to music while she was wearing her headphones in public (still looked pretty), and being insecure about her ex-boyfriend who is now engaged (still looked prettier than his fiancee). Aaaaaand she still got the guy in spite of her ‘awkwardness’ and ‘flaws’. Just like we all will some day!
  • Some Sweet (choreographed) Action: Guys the action in this movie was super hilarious. Apparently, in order to use your gun in the CIA you have to be doing one of the following things: a.) running -nobody in the CIA walks, b.) sliding over something – preferably a car or a bar of some sort, c.) driving a stolen vehicle, or d.) hanging off something – preferably a helicopter or a building. This is the kind of gold we pay our hard earned money to see.
  • Slapstick Comedy: This movie has some sophisticated jokes. Like, when she accidentally shoots him in the balls, or when they play all these pranks on each other, or when they make penis jokes! And the worst part is – we still laughed.


We could probably go on for a good while longer about why we love this movie. It was just so much fun! For all of you people still asleep and/or depressed about the state of American cinema from last Sunday, check this movie out. It promises a good time and some laughs and reminds us all why we, the people, actually go to the movies!

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Feb 22 2012
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Oscars

Most Boring Oscars Ever

You may or may not have noticed that we stopped watching Oscar contenders. That is due to the fact that this is shaping up to be the most boring Oscars ever, as we have absolutely nothing invested in the movies that are in contention.
All of the Oscar prognosticators have been saying for weeks now that The Artistpretty much has Best Picture in the bag. And yet, have we been to see it? No way, it looks super boring and only has French people we’ve never heard of in it.Unfortunately this sort of sums up the Oscars as a whole this year. Nothing interesting going on.Inherent Problems, or Why We Remain Uninterested:
1) There are only two nominees for Best Original Song. One of them is “Man or Muppet.” And yet, inexplicably, the Muppets are not performing. What??? This was clearly the most interesting thing that was going to happen this year and they nixed it.
2) Why are there so many nominees for Best Picture? Why are so few of them interesting? Why is one of them secretly a Lifetime Movie (The Help)? And why was it our favorite?????
3) While we love Billy Crystal, we were pretty excited about Eddie Murphy hosting it… Alas it is not happening… Brett Ratner definitely deserved to be fired for his homophobic comments, but we were sad that Eddie Murphy went with him.
4) Best Animated Feature as a category is just embarrassing for the Academy. Since they’ve expanded the number of Best Picture nominees, the quality animated movies (Up, Toy Story 3) are nominated for Best Picture. Sadly this year there was nothing quality enough for that to happen, and instead we are faced with Oscar nominee Kung Fu Panda 2. Come on.
5) Why is Harry Potter not nominated for more things? At the end of the Lord of the Rings franchise The Return of the King got a few Oscars despite being our least favorite film of the series! Harry Potter deserved a few more nods than it got!!

Fundamentally, there’s nothing to root for here. While we liked Hugo and The Help, we didn’t love them enough to actually be upset about them losing categories. Unlike years when everyone is rallying around a movie, there’s nothing here for anyone to really care about. Oscars: we would have cared move if you’d nominated Harry Potter. Obviously we’ll still check it out, but out of habit (and under protest) rather than from any personal investment. Hopefully it’s more interesting next year.

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Jan 25 2012
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Movies, Oscars

Some Thoughts on the Oscar Nominations

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s that time of year. Oscar nominations are finally here, and we can all collectively move on from trying to predict who will be nominated to trying to predict who will win.

But first, a few thoughts on where this year’s nominations went right and wrong.

Best Picture: There are 9!!! The Academy has required 10 nominations in the past couple of years, but they changed the rules this year and said that there could be anywhere between 5 and 10 nominated pictures based on some complicated mathematics. No one was really sure how many they’d nominate, but 9 is very much on the high end. Most of the nominations were pretty predictable, but we were shocked that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close got a nomination–we haven’t seen it, so no comment on quality, but it hasn’t picked up many other nominations. Otherwise, these nominations are pretty much exactly what you’d expect–although we thought that War Horse was a lost cause, evidently the Academy did not.

Best Actor: No Fassbender! We don’t really have other thoughts on this; this is otherwise pretty much who everyone expected to get nominated.

Best Actress: The exact 5 people who you’d think would get nominated got nominated. We would have loved to see a surprise nomination for Tilda Swinton, Elizabeth Olson, or Kirsten Dunst, but we can’t really argue with the performances that did score nominations.

We don’t care about Actor in a Supporting Role, so let’s jump to Actress in a Supporting Role, where Melissa McCarthy got nominated for Bridesmaids! Definitely the most exciting nomination to happen. Octavia Spencer looks to be her main competition.

Best Director: Snubs for Spielberg and Fincher in this category weren’t exactly surprises, but must sting a little bit. Especially for Spielberg, whose Adventures of Tintin was left out of Best Animated Feature in favor of Puss in Boots and Kung Fu Panda 2. Ouch.

Otherwise, the most exciting thing is that the lovely Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords now has a 50-50 shot at winning an Oscar for “Man or Muppet,” since only two songs were nominated for Best Original Song! Suck on that, Madonna. We’re also happy to see Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo pick up a nomination for Best Original Screenplay for Bridesmaids, though we would have loved to see 50-50 there as well.

Overall we are fairly on board with the Oscar nominations. We admittedly haven’t seen The Artist, but are uninterested enough that it looks like its inevitable sweep is going to make this a pretty boring year of Oscars. Academy, step up your game! However, we’re super happy about Hugo‘s 10 nominations and we’re hoping it can dent The Artist.

To see all of the nominees, go here.

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Jan 04 2012
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Movies, Oscars

Awards Season: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Poster

So this movie was one of THE most anticipated releases of the year. For starters, pretty much everyone in the entire world has read these novels. And pretty much everyone has seen the Swedish film made in 2009. (If you haven’t seen them, all three films are on Netflix Instant Play.)  This franchise is just insanely popular. But, for the few of you who do not know, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is based on Stieg Larsson’s international best selling novel of the same name, and follows the intertwining stories of Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced journalist, and Lisbeth Salander, a troubled but talented young woman as they try to solve a forty year old murder.

Now, going into the theater, we had already read the novels and seen the other films before. We knew what was going to happen, we were just excited to see how David Fincher would tell the story. And ultimately, we enjoyed the film. It is difficult to say whether one version of the film was really ‘better’ than the other. When it comes down to it, deciding which one to like better is really just a matter of taste. So instead of trying to assess its quality as a film, or critique the performances, here is a list of the things that we liked and didn’t like about David Fincher’s film version (MILD SPOILERS BELOW):

We Liked:

  • Opening credits: These were seriously some of the coolest ones that we have EVER seen! It is worth seeing the movie just for these! They are seriously SO AWESOME. Don’t come late to the movie and miss them!
  • The Cat: Even though we are decidedly dog people, the cat and Daniel Craig in this movie were really funny together!
  • Daniel Craig Shirtless: This is always ok with us.
  • Daniel Craig: We really liked him as Blomkvist, he was funny and believable. Also did we mention that his scenes with the cat were funny? Because they were.
  • Rooney Mara: Dude, she is intense in this movie. Completely unrecognizable from her role as Mark Zuckerburg’s ex-girlfriend in The Social Network, this actress delivers a pretty incredible performance.
  • The fact that they kept Blomkvist’s daughter in the script. They did not do this in the Swedish movie, and it was cool seeing it in this one.

We Did Not Like:

  • Lisbeth and Bjurman: We know that you are not supposed to like Bjurman because he is a horrible human being, but the rape scene in this movie is really, really terrifying and graphic. We left briefly during this scene because it is difficult to sit through.
  • Anita / Harriet Vanger Ending: We preferred the ending in the book where Harriet is in Australia, not where Harriet pretends to be Anita in London.
  • Pacing: It felt really, really slow at times. It also took like half of the movie for the two main characters to finally meet. And it could have been a little shorter.
  • The Part Where the Cat Died: We are kind of attached to the cat. There was nothing David Fincher could do to make us like this scene. So it’s not really his fault. We were just sad. And kind of grossed out.

Overall, we enjoyed it, and we are curious to see how David Fincher tackles the next installment in the series.

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Jan 01 2012
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Movies, Oscars

Awards Season: War Horse

Image

Oh my god, you guys. This movie.

Okay, so War Horse is featuring more and more in the conversation about the Oscars. And on paper, totally easy to see why! Steven Spielberg directing and producing. Based on the Tony Award-winning play. Starring every person with piercingly blue eyes that you’ve ever seen. Lots of sweeping shots of European countryside. World War I, so a period piece. And it’s about a horse! Everyone loves horses!

Indeed, they do, and so this movie is downright painful to sit through.

How We Know We Should Feel:

What a beautiful movie. War Horse was profoundly affecting on every level, and is Steven Spielberg’s finest film in years. Spielberg manages to convey the true horrors of war as seen through a single horse’s journey, and establishes a unique narrative by crafting the story around a horse rather than a consistent human protagonist.

The film’s composition is uniformly stunning, with the landscape of first the Devon countryside and later the grisly shots of war framed with equal care. Even the bleak holes and swamps of no-man’s-land have a sort of profound nobility to them.

Spielberg has truly accomplished something here–displaying in equal parts the futility and absolute destruction of war while also giving us the hope that can emerge from it.

How We Actually Feel:

Okay, fine, so the first like 20 minutes and the last 20 were beautiful and heartwarming and all that crap. The 2 hours in between, though, are grisly horror that we kept wishing would move faster.

Oh, something nice and heartwarming is happening? Oh that’s so nice maybe finally something good will happen–nope. Something terrible. Every single time. This isn’t even a spoiler, it’s just a warning. Every. Single. Time. There are like two times that this isn’t true.

Why is all of this necessary?? Yes, war is terrible, we understand. But that doesn’t mean that we feel the desire to sit through a 15-minute trench sequence. No one wants to see that. No, we don’t believe you, absolutely no one. Even within the “war is terrible” drumming, there are some plot holes that maybe only bother us so much (the gas??? Why he can’t hear what’s happening at the top of the hill?) but that fundamentally should have been addressed.

Yes yes, beautiful cinematography, etc. We realized at the end that the score for this was actually really amazing and complemented the whole picture, but not until the end because all of the rest of it was spent with us COWERING IN HORROR.

Conclusion:

Fair warning: lots and lots and lots of grisly war. We weren’t prepared for that amount of war, or for the amount of time that was spent just watching people die or looking at bodies. (Yes, we did notice that it’s called War Horse, thanks ever so. It’s based on a play with fucking puppets in it, shut up.) We maybe teared up at the end, but we aren’t convinced that the number that it did on our emotions was worth getting there. See at your own risk.

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Dec 30 2011
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Movies, Oscars

Awards Season: Hugo

via collider.com

There are some movies that you just know are going to be in the conversation for an Oscar. This year, Hugo… was definitely not one of them. At least not for us.Yes, Hugo was helmed by Martin Scorsese, who does tend to get most of his movies nominated. But still–it was a kids’ movie. Directed by Martin Scorsese. In 3-D. And it’s called Hugo, telling us exactly nothing about what is going to happen in the damn thing.

But then we saw it (after all of the film critics started talking about it.) And by god, Marty (hope he doesn’t mind that we’re calling him Marty) has done it again. Even if it is a kids’ movie, Hugo is honestly one of the flat-out best movies we’ve seen this year. Unlike Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, we were even able to understand and enjoy it.

So for Hugo, how we felt and how we should have felt were essentially the same thing. This is a show that you, and literally everyone you know (even randos you don’t know) will enjoy. So go see it. Here are the reasons why:

  1. That kid! Asa Butterfield played the title role, and oh how heartwrenching he is. Hugo has been orphaned, and his uncle has disappeared, leaving Hugo to take over his role in keeping the clocks in the giant train station running. Asa Butterfield does a superb job in such a large role, and his eyes alone show more emotion than many older actors. (Also, he’s been cast as Ender in the Ender’s Game movie adaptation slated for 2013, so we had several reasons to like him.)
  2. This movie, more than anything, is a love letter to the cinema. Martin Scorsese’s joy and wonderment in the art of film is evident throughout, but especially in the sequences dealing with the development of the technology and the films of Georges Melies.
  3. Simply put, the movie is utterly beautiful. Every shot is wonderfully composed, as one expects from Scorsese, but Hugo has a purity both of vision and spirit that Scorsese manages to capture and spread to the audience as well.
  4. The 3-D was tastefully done. While we are usually kind of nauseous at even the thought of another 3-D movie, this one was done well. It was not even really all that noticeable, and we mean this in a good way–it enhanced the movie and drew us in without calling attention to itself. We were even happy to have paid the extra money.
  5. Sacha Baron Cohen and his dog. They were the cutest villains of all time. For serious.
  6. Having not read the book, we truly had no idea where they were going with the plot. Maybe (probably) we are exceptionally bad at predicting things, but it surprised us in a pleasant way and at no point did we say, “Oh, that was sooo obvious.”
  7. The automaton! The automaton. We won’t say any more. But so perfect!


So guys, just go see it! It will make you happy! And it will make us happy if you do.

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Dec 29 2011
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Movies, Oscars

Awards Season: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
This was a movie where we had some personal issues. We at PopJudgment like to think of ourselves as film people, but sometimes we see movies that prove to us that this is simply not the case. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spyis one of those movies: the kind of movie where you know that you should feel one way about it, but frankly we felt completely differently. We’ll break those different ways down for you, in case you decide that you’d like to impress someone with how you know you should feel, too. (These are definitely the talking points that we’d stick to.)
How We Know We Should Feel:
This movie is excellent. It does not cater to the average viewer or compromise the understated espionage from the Le Carre novel it’s based on. There are no unnecessary car chases or explosions. Instead, it is an intelligent film featuring an all star cast. Gary Oldman is a fantastic lead as George Smiley, and despite the reserved nature of his character, we are mesmerised and captivated by him the whole time. The suspense is gripping, and you are literally immersed in the film, trying to pick up on subtle clues, figuring it out as Smiley does.

While everybody delivers a great performance, Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch were perhaps our personal favorites. Colin Firth, who just last year won an Academy Award for his performance in The King’s Speech, was an unlikely, but well-played antagonist. We was pleasantly surprised to see Benedict Cumberbatch (Atonement), one of our new favorite actors, who perhaps is best known for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes in the modern adaptation, Sherlock on the BBC. His was one of the few performances that actually made us cry, and he held his own next to some of Britain’s finest actors. Also noteworthy is Tom Hardy, made famous from his role in Inception. All in all, this is a great movie.

How We Actually Felt (Spoiler alert!):

  • Well, for starters, we had to traipse out to an artsy movie theater to see it.
  • We were the youngest people in the theater. By a couple of decades…
  • There are no unnecessary car chases or explosions.
  • WHY DID THEY HAVE TO MAKE MR. DARCY A RUSSIAN SPY?
  • We felt stupid while we were watching it.
    • All the actors were old/middle aged-ish British men who kind of looked the same.
    • To add to that they had names that kind of sound the same.
    • AND they all had code names that all sound the same (tinker, tailor, etc.). TOO MUCH FOR OUR BRAINS
    • They would show a book, or a table, or a file, or something in a shot and we were supposed to ‘get it.’ And like… connect the dots… instead we were confused
    • Even when they basically announced who the spy was we were still kind of confused…
    • So now we are still confused. AND all of our hopes and dreams of becoming a spy are officially dead. Because our brains are still trying to figure out what the hell happened. We would make horrible spies.

In conclusion, if you think this is a spy movie of the Jason Borne variety, you are sadly mistaken. You probably shouldn’t go. But if you like crossword puzzles, are a member of the AARP, can complete the super hard Sudokus, or have actually read the book, you would be more likely to enjoy this movie. Give it a go.

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