Oscars 2014

First of all, the winners:

Best Supporting Actor: Jared *hell yes!!* Leto (Dallas Buyers Club), who gave a wonderful speech in which he dedicated his award to all the people who died of or are still suffering from Aids. And who looks hot even with that silly Jesus haircut. ;-)

Best Supporting Actress: Lupita Nyong'o for her incredible performance in 12 Years A Slave. 

Best Actor: Matthew McConaughey for Dallas Buyers Club - woo hoo!! 

Best Actress: Cate Blanchett for Blue Jasmine. So glad. Sorry for Amy Adams and Sandra Bullock though. 

Best Movie: 12 Years A Slave. Oh well.... of course the slavery drama had to win. Enough said... 

About the ceremony itself... everyone likes Ellen, but ordering pizza is not enough to make a good show. I was a little disappointed. At least she wore quite an adorable fairy outfit for 2 minutes... ;-) 

The musical highlights were U2's unplugged performance of their song Ordinary Love - which, to my complete disbelief, did not win Best Film Song... oh well -,  and  either Karen O's performance of Moon Song, or Pink's interpretation of Somewhere Over The Rainbow. Great job, all of you.

Big loser is American Hustle with ten nominations and not a single award *thank god*. Big winner is Gravity *also, thank god* with ten nominations and seven awards. 

Two general notes that hold true for every single Oscar ceremony: 

1. WAY. TOO. MANY. COMMERCIALS!! JEEZ!

2. It is a pity that the people who organize etc the whole thing face a big dilemma. Many people (including me) only watch the Oscars for the five really important categories which are mentioned above. I am also interested in Best Animated Movie, Best Soundtrack/Song and the usual star gossip, but that's it. It's really a shame that there is so much time between the five categories (this time, 1 1/2 hours between Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress!). Then again, I guess 80% of the people who watch the Oscars would shut off the TV too soon if the five categories were presented first. I would. Plus, I could get a good night's sleep. ;-) 

Oscars are coming!!

Dear movie lovers,

these are my predictions (and wishes) for the Oscars this Sunday night. (I am only focusing on the really important categories.)


Best Movie
12 Years A Slave
Gravity, Dallas Buyers Club

Best Actor
Matthew McConaughey
Matthew McConaughey, Leo diCaprio (someone finally give him an Oscar, dammit!)

Best Actress
Cate Blanchett
Cate Blanchett, Sandra Bullock, Amy Adams 

Best Supporting Actor
Jared Leto, Michael Fassbender 
Jared Leto (I can't remember the last time I wanted so badly for a supporting actor to win an Oscar! I think his performance was the best one of the whole year, go Jared!) 

Best Supporting Actress
Lupita Nyong'o
Sally Hawkins

Philip Seymour Hoffman - an obituary

                                                    Philip Seymour Hoffman, (1967-2014)


I was shocked to read that actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died last Sunday at the age of only 46 with a great career to look back on and probably a lot of great acting moments still ahead of him.
I was also shocked to read it was apparently due to a heroine overdose and that he had  been addicted for a long time. Once more we see that a person can be very successful and praised, idolized even, in their job and remain a sad, desperate character behind the curtain.

Philip Seymour Hoffman was not only one of the best actors Hollywood has ever known. He was also likely among the best five actors of his generation - I am thinking of people like Russel Crowe or Johnny Depp.
It is sad that he was mostly cast for supporting roles such as the villian in Mission Impossble 3, Brandt in The Big Lebowski, or Freddie Miles in The Talented Mr Ripley, and is therefore not as famous as he clearly should have been.

as Freddie Miles in The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)

     
After a long long time of playing the less important characters, 2006 finally became his breakthrough. He was given the oscar for best actor for his unbelievable performance of bestselling author Truman Capote. Actually, I should say: he won it for becoming Truman Capote. The Time Magazine wrote that Hoffman "crowns ten years of brilliant work" with this role, and his transformation to the openly gay author with the exhaustingly exaggerated accent and manners is absolutely amazing.

as Truman Capote in Capote (2006)

When you saw Philip Seymour Hoffman in interviews, you often could not help but thinking "what a sweetheart!" and "oh, what a poor boy!" at the same time. There was always a tiny hint of sadness in his eyes, a little tinch of loneliness. Now that more and more details about his death and addiction to heroine are revealed, it becomes clear what a tragic figure he was - he might even have been able to play Capote so well because the author (according to the film) was a broken person inside, just like Hoffman himself probably was.
It is especially sad to see that the old story of the labile, sensitive genius that Hollywood has told so many times (Good Will Hunting, Inception, Magnolia) has once again found its way into real life.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, you were a wonderful actor, and I am sure you will be missed.

Misery (1990)

I am a sensitive person when it comes to horror movies. I try to make myself see as few as possible, but sometimes I am just too curious, and, well, curiosity killed the cat. At least I have made a deal with myself to never catch up on the list of Stephen King adaptations I haven't seen yet. Misery is only half as scary as The Shining which is a movie I swore I will never ever see again.

The movie Misery is not as brutal as the book. It is another Stephen King adaptation which the author wasn't happy with, and if you only know the book and thus expect a die-hard splatter movie with chopped off limbs then I must tell you: NO. You are not going to see that.
Bestseller author Paul Sheldon (played by James Caan) has a car accident and is rescued and taken care of by nurse Annie Wilkes (played by Kathy Bates) who turns out to be an absolutely devoted fan of his books, especially the Misery series. When she finds out that her beloved character dies in the latest volume, Annie is determined to make Paul change the ending - under any circumstances...

The horror in Misery is mostly silent (think Silence Of the Lambs rather than Saw) and yet omnipresent due to the incredible performance of Kathy Bates. (For those of you who are not sure who Kathy Bates is: the other nice rich woman besides Rose in Titanic. Hilary Swank's mother in P.S. I Love You. The hippie woman sharing the hot tub with Jack Nickolson  in About Schmidt.) You gotta love that woman. One minute she has an absolutely contagious smile, and the next minute she seems to be a demon straight from hell. Few actresses can pull that off so easily, and giving Bates the Oscar was one of the most appropriate decisions Hollywood has ever made. If you want to see great acting in a horror movie which is suitable for the more sensitive movie addict (;-) ), you should give Misery a try.


RATING: 4/5

Pina (Pina - Tanzt, tanzt, sonst sind wir verloren; 2011)

I knew who Pina Bausch was before I saw this movie. But I didn't have much of an idea of what exactly she had been famous for.
After seeing it, I realized what it was she did. And I understood why she became such a legend.

Pina Bausch (1940-2009) was a dance performer, choreographer, and dancing/ballet teacher and she was undoubtedly one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. She even influenced David Bowie. Do I need to say more? ;-)
This movie now is Wim Wender's monument to her art, a documentary showing extracts from four of her pieces. Some of her dancers  tell their story of how they became part of Bausch's ensemble, the Tanztheater Wuppertal. Pina is clearly not a movie for people whose preferred movie genre is only horror, or only action. You gotta be able to sit down, relax - maybe with a glass of wine, maybe even by yourself - and allow yourself to really sink into the wonders of Pina Bausch's art and the beauty of epxressing yourself through art in ways that at least I had never even thought were possible.

Kimberly Jones of The Austin Chronicle described the movie as an "utterly transfixing, exhilarating spectacle", and she couldn't have found better words. The fantastic score underlines perfectly what Pina was aiming at: creating a medium for expressing yourself and connecting with others through dancing. Wim Wenders made a movie that is overwhelming and incredibly fragile and tender at the same time. If you thought you knew what dancing meant, watch this movie and think again.

RATING: 5/5

Blue Is The Warmest Colour (Blau ist eine warme Farbe; La vie d'Adèle; 2013)

This is a movie that I had huge expectations in, almost as much as in Hunger Games pt.2 (which is a great movie and even better than pt. 1, go see it if you haven't yet!). It was hard to go into the movie theater without being prejudiced before and having some ideas (and hopes) about what the film would be like because of all the stuff I had heard in advance (very graphic sex scenes, one of the best movies of the year).
I won't give away too much of the story, just so much: I am disappointed.

The whole movie is three (!) hours long. The first hour shows mostly the daily routine of 17-year-old Adèle (played by Adèle (surprise!) Exarchopoulos) at school.... *sarcasm on* yes, how very interesting! *sarcasm off* By the time she finally gets together with beautiful, mysterious Emma (played by Lea Seydoux, the female villain from Mission Impossible 4) who is a total cliché of the flamboyant art student, you are very likely to have yawned a few times or shifted in your seat wondering when the movie was finally going to develop a plot.

Coming to talk about the oh-so-graphic sex scenes. Journalists have not exaggerated when they described those scenes as hot, BUT.... author Julie Maroh  - the woman who whote the comic on which the movie is based - described those scenes best when she compared them to porn, saying that "the gay and queer people laughed because it's not convincing, and found it ridiculous" while guys will probably be "feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies". EXACTLY. There is not much more to say about it. Many times I was thinking I was watching internet porn or something. It is very clear where director Abdellatif Kechiche got his "inspiration" from. I am not saying porn is bad or evil. I am saying, however, if you want to make art, you should aim higher. It's actually what you owe the lesbian audience whose love life you are trying to picture.

Apart from those three things (length, boringness and ridiculous sex scenes), the movie is better than many other lesbian movies. It avoids the typical shallowness and uptightness, and the actresses do a very good job. The (straight) people I saw the movie with liked it much better than me, so maybe the movie is more enjoyable for a straight audience.


RATING: 3/5

Blue Jasmine (2013)

This is my first post on a movie that is still in theaters - and my first post on a Woody Allen movie, whose Blue Jasmine is his best movie in a long time.
The movie has been compared to A Streetcar Named Desire... I would compare the leading role to Jane in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane in terms of totally not caring about your appearance anymore, having hallucinations, drinking... What I am trying to say is that Blue Jasmine is especially worth seeing for the incredible performance of leading actress Cate Blanchett who is going to win the Oscar in february 2014... my prediction. ;-)

Woody Allen has made great movies such as Midnight In Paris, or - of course - Annie Hall (Der Stadtneurotiker), but also movies that leave you wondering what the point in seeing the movie actually was (e.g. Whatever Works). David Denby wrote in The New Yorker that Blue Jasmine is "the strongest, most resonant movie Woody Allen has made in years". This is true.
With the help of flashbacks, Jasmine Francis remembers the life she lived in New York as the wife of wealthy businessman Hal (played by Alec Baldwin) until she lost all her properties and had to move to San Francisco to live with her much poorer sister Ginger (played by Sally Hawkins). One could thus say that there are two plot lines. During the movie we see Jasmine struggle with having to find a job and being too ashamed about her situation to be honest with potential boyfriends - and we also learn how crippled the relationship between the two sisters is. The end culminates in a fight between the two sisters in which Ginger reveals her true feelings for Jasmine.

Woody Allen has made a movie that looks behind the facade of rich people and leaves us feeling sorry for them. Jasmine lives in a marriage full of lies and self-humiliation (especially on her part). She desperately tries to hold on to that life, and is unable to ask for help. In the end we can only pity her and come to the conclusion that Ginger, who works as a cashier in a small grocery store, is much happier in her life than Jasmine has ever been.

Blue Jasmine is a very exhausting movie to see - but in a positive way.

RATING: 4/5