Tag Archives: Daniel Day Lewis

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Oscars 2013 Predictions

The Oscars are only about an hour away. Need some help winning your party’s pool? Here are my predictions.If you win, feel free to treat me to a movie! 

Best Picture – Argo. I’m going with my head this year instead of my heart for my picks, but I’m glad they match up here. I think the Academy feels like they made a mistake for not bothering to nominate Ben Affleck for Best Director and will give Argo the best picture as retribution.
Leading Actor – Daniel Day Lewis. If you pick anyone else, don’t even both reading the rest of this post. You’re losing your pool.
Supporting Actor – Christoph Waltz. Waltz and Tommy Lee Jones are in a dead heat according to the Vegas odds. I’d like to think Waltz’s performance in Django can beat out Tommy Lee Jones playing Tommy Lee Jones in a wig.
Leading Actress – Jennifer Lawrence. But Jessica Chastain deserves it.
Supporting Actress – Anne Hathaway
Animated Feature – Wreck-It-Ralph
Cinematography – Life of Pi
Costume Design – Anna Karenina
Directing – Stephen Speilberg – Lincoln
Documentary Feature – Searching for Sugarman
Documentary Short – Open Heart
Film Editing – Zero Dark Thirty
Foreign Language Film – Amour
Makeup and Hairstyling – Les Miserables
Original Score – Life of Pi (Toss up between this and Lincoln)
Original Song – Skyfall
Production Design – Les Miserables
Animated Short Film – Paperman
Liver Action Short Film – Curfew
Sound Editing – Life of Pi
Sound Mixing – Skyfall
Visual Effects – Life of Pi
Adapted Screenplay – Argo
Original Screenplay – Argo
Good luck! 
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Silver Linings Playbook – Review

4/5 – The movie where you realize Bradley Cooper is a serious actor.

It has to stink having the movie where you show the world that you’re a really good dramatic actor comes out the same year that Daniel Day Lewis has a new movie. That’s exactly what happened to Bradley Cooper with Silver Linings Playbook. If Daniel Day Lewis wasn’t in Lincoln this year, I think Bradley Cooper would walk home with the Oscar for Best Performance by an Actor in a Lead Role.

I like Bradley Cooper a lot, but if you had told me this time last year that I thought he would be the runner up for the Best Lead Actor Oscar, I would have called you nutty. Before Silver Linings Playbook, Cooper has been known mostly for his very good comedic skills (Wedding Crashers, The Hangover) and movies that banked on his good looks (The A-Team, Valentine’s Day). 
Silver Linings Playbook is the movie that tells the world Bradley Cooper is one damn good actor. In the movie, he plays Pat, a guy who had to do a stint in a mental institution after having the worst day of his life. In Pat’s defense, I think everything he did to that teacher in his bathroom was justifiable.
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Pat has issues: rage, insecurity, an obsession with his separated wife, and Cooper plays these issues brilliantly. His parents have issues in the movie too, and you can see how they’ve influenced Pat in how well Cooper plays him to be both a little like his mother and a little like his father. 
Speaking of Pat’s father, Robert De Niro turns in a great performance as Pat Sr. Robert De Niro in Silver Linings Playbook is the antithesis of Tommy Lee Jones in Lincoln. In Lincoln, Tommy Lee Jones’s Thaddeus Stevens is Tommy Lee Jones in a wig. But Pat Sr. is not just Robert De Niro in an Eagles sweater. There were points in the movie where I found myself completely lost in the family dynamic of Pat’s family. I wasn’t seeing Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro on the screen. I was seeing Pat and Pat Sr.
I can relate to Frank Sr’s superstitions. My dad and I once banned my mother from 
the living room when we thought she was jinxing the Yankees during the World Series.

Jennifer Lawrence reminds you that she’s the same actress who excelled in Winter’s Bone, not just the face of Hunger Games. She has a scene-stealing scene confronting Pat and his family. This scene is definitely what has garnered her so many awards nominations. It’s definitely the second-best scene in the movie.
What’s the best scene? Without a doubt it’s a scene I don’t want to spoil, but one that comes near the very end of the film. I laughed hysterically, and then did so again a few moments later, and that’s all I’ll say on that.

David O. Russell once again created an excellent movie. His last movie, The Fighter, was my favorite movie of 2010. While Silver Linings Playbook is not my favorite movie of 2012, I definitely give it a very high recommendation. 

I fully expect their dance to be incorporated into many weddings.
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Oscars Rage!!

What!? Are you kidding me?!

Pardon the rage. The Oscar nominations came out today. I don’t always agree with the nominations, but this year seems particularly egregious.

I have four major problems with this year’s Oscar nominations:

Ben Affleck gets snubbed for Directoring. I was shocked to find out Ben Affleck wasn’t nominated for Directoring. Did you see Argo? If you did, I’m guessing it’s easily in the top five movies you saw this year. It is the best of the movies I’ve seen that was nominated for Best Picture, and the second best movie I’ve seen this year. After seeing the Best Picture nominees, Argo seemed like a shoe-in for the Best Picture winner. But the last time a movie won Best Picture without the director being nominated for Directoring was Driving Miss Daisy in 1989.

I would definitely nominate Ben Affleck for Argo over Steven Spielberg for Lincoln. And I’d give Ben the award too.

Lincoln gets 12 nominations. Lincoln was a good movie. It was not a great movie. Daniel Day Lewis was awesome in it and deserves to win Actor in a Leading Role. He deserves every bit of praise he gets for playing Lincoln.

But Tommy Lee Jones? No way. I loved Tommy Lee Jones in Lincoln, but that’s because I love Tommy Lee Jones, and in Lincoln, Tommy Lee Jones was playing Tommy Lee Jones as a senator. Tommy Lee Jones is the new Jack Nicholson. You can put him in any role you want, but chances are you’re going get Tommy Lee Jones playing Tommy Lee Jones. Like I said, I love Tommy Lee Jones, but I don’t think he should have been nominated.

I saw three movies that Joseph Gordon Levitt was in this year. Out of the three, Lincoln came in third place. I don’t think Lincoln should have been nominated for Best Picture. It was good, not great. Its spot could easily have gone to Looper, the best JGL movie of 2012. But…

Looper was completely snubbed. Best movie of the year. Zero nominations. At the very, very least, it should have been nominated for Best Picture and Writing: Original Screenplay.

Wreck-It Ralph deserved a Best Picture nomination. I thought we were past the days of great animated movies being stuck in the Animated Feature Film ghetto. Wreck-It Ralph was awesome. It lived up to its name and wrecked it. It wasn’t technically a Pixar film, but for all intents and purposes, it was a Pixar movie. And like all Pixar movies that don’t have the word Cars in their title, it rocked. But then again, so did Argo and Looper and the Academy was more than happy to short all three of these movies in favor of gushing over “I’m at least a half hour too long” Lincoln.

I’m watching the 18th Annual Critics Choice Awards while I write this rant. Affleck walked off the stage with the Best Director award. Looper won earlier for best Sci-Fi/Horror Movie. Maybe the Academy should have waited a few days before they released their imperfect list of nominees.

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Lincoln – Review

After a brief stop at Shake Shack after seeing Wreck-It Ralph, we headed back to the theater and caught Lincoln.
In the battle of movies I saw that night, Wreck-It Ralph was the clear winner over Lincoln.
I was excited for the cast of Lincoln. I thought that Daniel Day Lewis was perfect as Abraham Lincoln. I thought Joseph Gordon Levitt was great as Lincoln’s eldest son. I loved Tommy Lee Jones in the movie. His character was actually my favorite in the movie.
I also really loved the way handled Lincoln’s assassination. It was done from a very different and unexpected point of view.
But the story was kind of on the boring side. There was a part of the movie where I realized I had just glazed over during the scene completely. It was during one of the “we need to convince this guy to vote our way” scenes. I have no idea how they convinced him. I came to just in time to find out they did. Just thinking about that scene as I type this is putting me back to sleep…
I was more interested in Tommy Lee Jones’s character, Thaddeus Stevens, than I was in Abraham Lincoln. If the movie was his story, I think I would have been much more entertained. Sure, there would have to be a title change, but that’s a small price to pay to be entertained. Bring on the Thaddeus Stevens movie!
This guy rocks!
One of the most fascinating parts about the movie was who were the abolitionist and who were pro-slavery. I always thought it was a north-south divide, and figured the loudest abolitionists would be from the far northern states, and the pro-slavery guys would be the southern-border states. But the loudest person pro-slavery was a Representative from New York. Being a native New Yorker, that kind of bummed me out
As for me not being able to really get into the movie, I guess I should have taken it as a bad sign for the movie when in the opening scene, I hoped that the camera followed the black union soldier that was talking to Lincoln instead of staying on Lincoln. Even that early on, I subconsciously had the feeling that the side characters would be more interesting than the title character of the film.
Oh, and where were the vampires?