2013 Oscar Preview

The day is finally here. Probably the tightest Oscar race in years concludes tonight, in perhaps a not so surprising way. Lincoln leads all nominees with twelve, followed by Life of Pi with eleven. There were so many great movies this year that I get the feeling many movies are going to go home tonight with at least one win, and there isn't going to be one movie that dominates most of the categories. I personally enjoy years like this. It shows that the Oscars recognize how great of a year it's been for movies, and while only one can walk away with Best Picture, many more are recognized throughout the night.

I'm personally very excited for the broadcast. The past few Oscar telecasts have been pretty boring, to say the least. I think the choice of Seth MacFarlane will not only bring a more modern vibe to the event, but also bring in younger viewers who may not have tuned in otherwise. There are also plenty of rumors surrounding various appearances at the show, with I think the most exciting being the rumor that all six men to play James Bond will appear. Adele is set to perform her song, "Skyfall", from the newest Bond movie of the same name, and there is also a planned tribute to the 50th anniversary of the character. Many people have speculated this would mean that the six men to play Bond on the big screen, Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig, will all appear together to kick off the tribute. It would be the first time ever all six men have appeared at a tribute for the character. However, early talk made it seem as if Connery was the lone man to not want to do it, but a part of me thinks he may have come around to the idea. Commercials for the Oscars have begun to focus on the Bond tribute, which makes me believe even more that something big is set to happen. I think if it were to happen, it would end up being one of the best moments in the history of the Oscars. Imagine the reaction if all six walk out on stage as Adele is wrapping up "Skyfall", with a montage of the character's best moments playing on the big screen.

Host Seth MacFarlane

However, the big reason we watch the show is to find out who will win. Like I said earlier, there are a lot of great movies up for awards tonight and it really could go in several different directions. Lincoln and Argo are the two frontrunners, but don't be surprised if smaller movies like Amour and Silver Linings Playbook walk away with some bigger prizes. Everyone has talked that, without Ben Affleck nominated for Best Director, it's a two way race between Steven Spielberg (Lincoln) and Ang Lee (Life of Pi). While these two are the most likely, don't be surprised if Michael Haneke sneaks in with a win for Amour, which is as much a lock as there is in the Best Foreign Language category. Anne Hathaway is pretty much a sure thing as well for Best Supporting Actress for her terrific performance in Les Misérables, but watch out for an upset from Sally Field in Lincoln. There's also the question of whether or not Pixar can still dominate the Best Animated Feature category. While I think Brave is one of their better movies, moviegoers seemed to enjoy Wreck-It-Ralph more. Pixar didn't even have a movie nominated last year (Cars 2 was really that bad), so it'll be interesting to see if they can reclaim their throne.

Below are my predictions for tonight's winners. I've also included my personal picks on who should win, and for the bigger categories, highlight some movies and performances that the Oscars missed out on nominating. Be sure to watch the telecast tonight at 8:30 on ABC!

Best Picture
Will Win: Argo
Should Win: Argo
Left Out: Moonrise Kingdom, Skyfall

Best Director
Will Win: Steven Spielberg, Lincoln
Should Win: Ben Affleck, Argo (not nominated)
Left Out: Affleck, Kathryn Bigelow Zero Dark Thirty, Quentin Tarantino Django Unchained

Best Actor
Will Win: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
Should Win: Day-Lewis
Left Out: John Hawkes, The Sessions




Best Actress
Will Win: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Should Win: Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
Left Out: Marion Cotillard, Rust and Bone

Best Supporting Actor 
Will Win: Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook
Should Win: Honestly, any of them are deserving.
Left Out: Leonardo DiCaprio, Django Unchained

Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway in Les Misérables

Best Supporting Actress
Will Win: Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables
Should Win: Hathaway
Left Out: Judi Dench, Skyfall

Best Original Screenplay
Will Win: Zero Dark Thirty
Should Win: Django Unchained
Left Out: Looper

Best Adapted Screenplay
Will Win: Argo
Should Win: Argo
Left Out: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

These predictions for the "lesser" categories will just include my winner predictions:

Best Animated Feature
Brave

Best Animated Short
Paperman

Best Foreign Language Film
Amour

Best Feature Documentary
Searching for Sugar Man

Best Documentary Short 
Open Heart

Best Cinematography
Skyfall

Best Production Design
Anna Karenina

Best Costume Design
Anna Karenina

Best Original Score
Life of Pi

Best Original Song
Skyfall

Best Editing
Argo

Best Sound Editing
Skyfall

Best Sound Mixing
Les Misérables

Best Visual Effects
Life of Pi

Best Live Action Short
Curfew

Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Les Misérables

A Good Day to Die Hard Review

Fans of the Die Hard series were begging for an R-rated movie after Live Free or Die Hard was rated PG-13. It was blasphemous! How can you have a movie with John McClane be PG-13?! Well, the fans got what they wanted, but like Linkin Park sang, in the end it doesn't really matter.

A Good Day to Die Hard is the fifth film in the franchise, and hopefully it's the last one, at least for awhile. Bruce Willis  is back as NYPD Cop John McClane, and he fits into the character as well as he can after 20+ years in the series. He's about the only highlight in an otherwise awful, awful movie. The movie focuses on him heading to Russia to find his son, Jack, played by Jai Courtney, who he thinks is a drug dealer or something. Yeah, because in order for Jack to be a successful drug dealer, he had to travel all the way to Russia. Anyway, John finds out his son is working for the CIA on a top-secret nuclear weapons case, and the two team up like the father-son duo they are and head out to stop the bad guys.

Ugh. What's happened to this series? Honestly, I mean, the original Die Hard is probably one of, if not the best action movies of all time. What makes it so great is that it doesn't resort itself to mindless action and car chases, but builds tension and gives great payoffs because of it. It's the perfect mix of a being a great action movie that you don't have to think about in order to enjoy, but if you pay attention, it's even better. This movie is the complete opposite. A movie that is straight-up action for 97 minutes can be really great if it's done the right way. Director John Moore's action sequences are such a jumbled mess that you can't even enjoy them, and a five minute car chase feels like it takes hours to slog through. There's far too much cutting and editing in the movie that we can't even begin to understand what we're watching or why.

One of the great things about the original movie (and the third, Die Hard with a Vengeance) is that the villains are just as entertaining, if not more so, than McClane. Yeah, we know we're rooting for McClane, and know he's going to win, but having a great villain testing him throughout the movie adds to how fun and exciting it can be to watch. With A Good Day, the villains are just there as a means to move the movie towards its conclusion. Granted, this movie is more about the relationship between McClane and his son, but there needs to be real danger there; there needs to be a sense that the villain's have a chance at winning, or at least be enjoyable when they're on screen. Another major issue is that there's too many villains for one movie; just another example of the movie trying top itself, and the series, again and again.

I understand that action movies aren't going to make much sense in terms of real world scenarios. I get it: the more ridiculous the action, the more fun it can be. But a movie shouldn't treat it's audience like complete idiots. Without giving much away, I'll say that the final action scenes of the movie take place in Chernobyl. Yeah, that Chernobyl, the one devastated by nuclear fallout and has been abandoned for years; where the radiation level is so high that it may never be livable again. Minor characters walk around in HAZMAT suits so as not to be affected by the radiation levels. What do John and Jack do? They drive to Chernobyl, and just start shooting the place up in their street clothes. No need for radiation suits here! The McClane's are invisible! I can understand that you can't have a climatic action sequence while not being able to see the faces of your stars if they're hidden under a HAZMAT suit, but seriously, they couldn't have put the scene in another city in Russia? I'm not expecting the movie to be as accurate as can be, but ridiculous things like this made me hate the movie even more than I already did.

Yippee Ki-Yuck

The only real redeeming thing about A Good Day is that Bruce Willis is still fun to watch as this character. He still has great timing and is just as spry of an action hero as his younger counterpart. But the rest of the movie is just downright shit. There really is no other way to say it. I really can't see there being a sixth Die Hard after this. Even though the fourth movie wasn't exactly terrific, I thought it was decent enough to warrant a fifth movie, just to see how it would go. This movie could have been so much more than it is. The idea of having McClane team up with his son is actually a really good idea. It could have taken a similar route as Skyfall did with James Bond, and realize that John McClane is getting old, and he can't do this kind of stuff too much longer. It could have been the beginning of passing the series onto his son; maybe a sixth movie is where John finally calls it quits, and movie seven follows his son exclusively, starting a reboot for the franchise of sorts. It would still honor the roots of the series, while updating itself for a new generation. 

Instead, it's as if the writers just couldn't think of a way to get John McClane into Russia on his own, so they had to send his son over there. By the way, one of the things I don't get is that John keeps yelling, "I'm on vacation!" throughout the movie. I thought he was coming to Russia to get his son, so technically he's not on vacation? 

It's really upsetting to see this franchise fall so flat on its face. Die Hard spawned so many knock offs that it was refreshing to see it stay true to itself with most of the movies in its series. A Good Day to Die Hard, though, is just as bad of a parody of the original as anything that came after it. As much as I can't see another movie being made, there's a big part of me that sees that as inevitable. The movie is tops at the box office right now, and as long as Bruce Willis continues to be willing to return to the role, I don't see them shutting the series down anytime soon. I just hope that the right director can be found who will be willing to bring the franchise back to its roots and remember what made this series so successful in the first place. Until then, A Good Day to Die Hard leaves a very bad lasting memory of a once great series.

Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Movie

Safe Haven Review

There's a part of me that says I shouldn't have enjoyed this movie as much as I did. I'm not trying to say I thought the movie was fantastic or anything, but that it kind of exceeded my expectations. Granted, judging from the early reviews I read and just the overall experience with movies like this (sappy romances), I didn't expect hardly anything, and came away from it pleasantly surprised.

Julianne Hough is being hunted down for murder, and so to escape, she catches a bus ride down to Southport, North Carolina, where she quickly makes friends with Josh Duhamel and his two kids. Of course the two fall instantly in love and neither really seems to question why just about everyone they interact with in this town is so god damn good looking. In any case, Hough tries to make a new life. She gets a job at the local restaurant, and buys a shack in the woods to live in, which seems kind of odd considering she's frightened almost every night that there's someone outside trying to break in. Isn't there another house in the actual city of Southport? Also, the town doesn't seem to worry about trivial matters such as credit history or bank accounts when it comes to purchasing a home, even if it is a cabin in the woods. Anyway, while Hough is playing house in North Carolina, a detective is looking for her back in her hometown, who, despite his good looks (seriously! Is there not one ugly person in Nicholas Sparks' world??), has some hidden demons that may compromise his ability to find her. Or something like that.

They're trying desperately to make a movie star out of Julianne Hough, who starred in last year's Rock of Ages, but she just doesn't quite deliver a memorable performance here. It's just pretty meh. I get the feeling she'll get a few more starring roles in movies like this, but I don't see her becoming another Rachel McAdams or someone to that effect who's a bankable romance star. She does, however, have a starring role in Diablo Cody's directorial debut, Paradise, which is set for a release later this year. Cody wrote the screenplays for great movies focusing on female leads like Juno and Young Adult, so that is maybe Hough's best chance at showing that she has what it takes to be a star in Hollywood.

It irks me that in all of these kinds of movies lately the female star is a tall, borderline unhealthily-thin blonde, and the male lead is a rugged-looking outcast. It's what I call The Notebook effect. There really isn't two more prototypical stereotypes in romance movies, and I wish that more of these movies would step out of that element into something different. Would it make the movie significantly better? Probably not, but it'd be nice to see a variety in the stars of these movies. After awhile, it becomes impossible to separate the Julianne Hough's from the Taylor Schilling's of movie world.

I felt like the whole plotline of the detective searching for Hough really made the movie drag in the middle. Again, this is the kind of movie that could have been cut by 20 minutes and not really lost much in terms of its overall story. The scenes with the detective really took me out of the romance between Duhamel and Hough's characters, which is kind of the point of the movie in the first place. I guess I can see why that storyline is there (it builds for the inevitable climatic ending), but it just weighed the movie down. There's a twist towards the end of the movie that isn't really all that shocking to begin with (careful watchers will be able to pick up the clues as the movie goes along), which gives the ending that little extra Nicholas Sparks sappy ending we've seen before.

Even the kids are adorable!

Probably the best thing about Safe Haven is the scenery. It's set in a coastal North Carolina town, and it makes for some really nice looking shots, particularly towards the end of the movie, set on July 4th evening. Duhamel has some really great moments with the two kids in the movie, and he gives a really convincing performance as a father to them. It's not anything forced or that seems fake. There are a few storylines with the kids that I kind of wish the movie would have focused on more, but then again the movie isn't really about them.

People have said that the twist is ludicrous and insulting, but I disagree. It wasn't something that came as a shock, and, while I don't really think the movie benefited enough from the twist in order to warrant it being in there, it kind of makes sense in the context of the movie. I didn't find it all that shocking; I had it mostly figured out about thirty minutes in, but the movie could have done more with it. I think it would have been interesting to learn the twist earlier in the movie. While it probably makes early scenes more intriguing on a second viewing, I feel a movie should base itself around the idea that people are only going to see it once. Safe Haven isn't the kind of movie that needs to end with a surprising twist.

I've never read a Nicholas Sparks book. I probably will at some point just to get an idea of his writing style, but I can't imagine all his books being as cookie cutter as the adaptions that have come from them. Even though I highlighted a few things I liked in Safe Haven, there's far too much here that we've seen before in other romantic dramas recently. There are scenes in Safe Haven taken almost directly from other movies based off his books like The Lucky One and The Notebook. I think that is the main problem critics tend to have with these movies. Although they're different on some levels, most of the plot is the same as the last movie. The Lucky One and Safe Haven are in many ways the same movie, with just a reversal of gender for the main characters. Also, can I just ask, why is there so much rain in all his movies? And why is it always during a big dramatic scene? There are other forms of weather, people!

Safe Haven pretty much boils down to being just a more well-funded Lifetime movie. I don't necessarily mean that as an insult, but that's basically what we're dealing with here. There's nothing new that stands out or makes it memorable from the countless other romantic dramas we've seen since The Notebook started this Nicholas Sparks type of romance drama back in 2004. That being said, it's not a terrible movie, it's just kind of there. It's merely a means to get couples into the seats for a date night on a weekend.

Has its Moments

Identity Thief Movie Review

Trying to make an identity thief a likable character? Probably something that sounds really impossible, and at times I didn't think Identity Thief would be able to pull it off, but somehow it did. Maybe that's more credit to how funny and just downright lovable Melissa McCarthy is than the movie itself. Identity Thief stars McCarthy and Jason Bateman, and to make a long story short McCarthy steals Bateman's identity and is living it up down in Florida. She's buying way too much stuff for one person and is having way too good a time doing it that you almost begin to kind of envy her a little. Only a little bit. I mean, she is a criminal, right? Who would want to buy anything they ever wanted and get away with it, most of the time? Anyway, in order for him to get his job and financial name back, he has to go down to Florida and bring her back to his home in Colorado.  It really doesn't make all that much sense if this were a real world situation, but, it's a stupid-comedy. We just go with it. It sets the movie up as another road trip comedy with two people who don't want anything to do with one another, and we get all of the obligatory road trip type jokes that we've seen before, yet they're still pretty funny no matter how many times we've seen them.

The great thing about Identity Thief is that both Bateman and McCarthy are both really, really funny in pretty much everything that they do. Also, both are really likable as well. The only problem is that they both play pretty much the same characters in all of their movies. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, (if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?) but what if the roles were reversed? We've seen McCarthy as this outspoken, sassy do-it-all-myself woman before in movies like Bridesmaids, and Bateman's hard working family man in stuff like Horrible Bosses. But what if this time McCarthy was the victim and Bateman was the con? I think it could have been great to see these two kind of step out of their element a little bit into a role they're not all that familiar with. It's not to say that the movie isn't funny enough as is, but it could have made it a little more unique if the roles were reversed. 

If I'm thinking correctly, other than the TV show Mike & Molly this is McCarthy's first starring role in a movie. She has another movie coming out in April co-starring Sandra Bullock titled The Heat, which looks pretty funny as well. The success or failure of these two movies will kind of be a good indication of if McCarthy has what it takes to be a leading lady in movies, or is going to be the type of actress destined for supporting roles her whole career. I think she could be a great comedy star as long as she picks the right movies, and doesn't just do any comedy where she's getting the lead role.

Like I said before we've seen this kind of road trip comedy before, but the movie tries to make it different by bringing in a plot point of having several hit men after McCarthy. I guess it makes sense in the context of the movie, seeing that she's stolen other people's identities and probably pissed off a lot of people. But, to be honest there's no reason for it to be in the movie, and it just makes Identity Thief drag on in a few spots. You can have an enjoyable road trip movie without someone chasing someone. The movie is two hours long, and I honestly can't think of a reason why it couldn't be thirty minutes shorter. When I come to see a movie like Identity Thief, I'm not seeing it for its aesthetic quality or for it to make me think. I'm coming to see it because I want to laugh and have an enjoyable time. While there are some really funny moments in the movie, the sub plot with the hit men really makes the movie drag. There should be a requirement that stupid but enjoyable comedies like Identity Thief are no more than 90 minutes long, unless you can prove that you can keep the pace of the movie going without much of a hiccup along the way. 

Even though this is mostly designed as a straight up comedy, there are some really touching moments towards the end where McCarthy and Bateman bond and you think okay, I guess I can kind of see why this woman would feel the need to steal people's identities and ruin their entire lives for her own benefit. The movie ends with some pretty touching scenes that almost don't feel like they belong in this type of movie, but they work because McCarthy and Bateman do a good job of making them seem true to the characters that they're playing. 

Even though there's some plot issues and it's not exactly a rip-roaring comedy that will have you falling out of your seat, Identity Thief is a good time. This is the type of movie that you just sit back and enjoy and try not to think about too much. It's pretty forgettable, but it it's enjoyable enough while you're watching it. McCarthy is great, Bateman is good, and they work really well together. It's just not quite good enough for me to say that you need to go see this movie right now. It is what it is, and that's pretty much all we want it to be. 

Has Its Moments