2015 was a year of meager expectations when it came to the Oscars. While controversy surrounded the nomination process, we generally knew who’d take home the major awards. No one gasped in amazement when Birdman took Best Cinematography, or when Patricia Arquette was named Best Supporting Actress for Boyhood. Yet sometimes there is intrigue to be found […]
Movie Fail Tweets the 2015 Academy Awards
Keep it locked here for the Movie Fail live Twitter coverage of the 87th Academy Awards ceremony! The full list of 2015 Oscar nominees can be found here. The one and only Neil Patrick Harris will be hosting. The festivities begin at 7 pm EST on ABC (or online). Tweets by @MovieFailBlog We want to hear […]
Nate’s Top 10 Films of 2014
So many movies released in the past twelve months felt like advertisements that it was nice when the year periodically decided to come back from commercial break. That doesn’t mean that every non-blockbuster was a masterpiece. For every gem like The Grand Budapest Hotel there were duds like Palo Alto or Transcendence. And don’t get me started on The Giver again. I […]
Birdman with J and Søren
J’s Review Birdman comes close to greatness. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s execution of the long take is so successful it almost makes me forget about everything else in the film. I love how it moves from supposed fantasy to supposed reality without cuts, removing the objectivity that comes with a shot change. Watching fantasy elements shift into reality within a […]
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Grand Budapest Hotel bubbles with verve. Wes Andersons’s aesthetic melts over every frame of the movie. His trademark zooms and pans give his latest film an almost documentarian feel, echoing the faux-nature special look of a Jaime Uys film. But unlike Uys, there is no pretense of realism in Anderson’s world. Instead, we see into […]
Moonrise Kingdom
Wes Anderson has a special place in my heart. Back in 2007, during one of the many times my mother sat me down to watch some obscure film she’d heard about, she popped in a film that sounded incredibly drab to my younger self entitled The Darjeeling Limited. To my surprise, ninety-one minutes later, a broad smile had crept […]