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What Are You Most Anticipating? (Dec. 2020, Wide)
Loading ...Film Preview: Major Arcana (2020)
Page Revisions:
(November 15, 2020) Original
Release Date:
October 9, 2020
Synopsis:
From IMDb: “A long-troubled itinerant carpenter returns home to small town Vermont and attempts to build a log cabin by hand, hoping to free himself from a cycle of poverty and addiction. But when he reconnects with Sierra, a woman with whom he shares a complicated past, he becomes locked in a desperate struggle between the person he was and the person he hopes to become.”
Poster Rating: C- / C-
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Review: (#1) This first design shows the hard-working protagonist. It’s blurry and doesn’t appeal. (#2) This looks at the tarot reading at the center of the trailer and does not do anything else with it. The only interesting part of both designs is how the title is partly cut-off on all four sides. It’s an interesting aesthetic choice.
Trailer Rating: D
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Review: The trailer does very little to get the audience interested in this film about a man with a mysterious past trying to find and reinvent himself through hard work and love. It’s a design that struggles mightily to look interesting and fails.
Oscar Prospects:
None.
Trailer #1
Weekend Preview: Nov. 27-29, 2020
Below are four previews for films opening next weekend.
The Croods: A New Age (Wide)
Hillbilly Elegy (Limited)
Princess of the Row (Limited)
Stardust (Limited)
Film Preview: Stardust (2020)
Page Revisions:
(November 22, 2020) Original
Release Date:
November 25, 2020
Synopsis:
From IMDb: “Stardust will chronicle the young David Bowie’s first visit to the US in 1971 – a trip that inspired the invention of his iconic alter ego Ziggy Stardust.”
Poster Rating: B
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Review: The psychedelic colors certainly conjure up images of David Bowie, at least once you’re thinking about him and the Ziggy Stardust character. Other than that, it’s not particularly engaging.
Trailer Rating: C-
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Review: It should always be a warning to audiences when a biopic of a famous singer never uses a single musical cue from his life. This trailer doesn’t present a very compelling picture of one of the 20th Century’s great musical artists. Thankfully, it sticks to a very small window of David Bowie’s life, but the trailer doesn’t do an adequate job conveying why that’s important.
Oscar Prospects:
None.
Trailer #1
This Day in Oscar History: November 22 (2020)
Here’s what happened today in Oscar History.
Born
Died
Released
Film Preview: Dune Drifter (2020)
Page Revisions:
(November 15, 2020) Original
Release Date:
December 1, 2020
Synopsis:
From IMDb: “After a devastating orbital space battle, the survivor of a crashed star-fighter must navigate the harsh environment of a desolate planet to save herself before her life support expires.”
Poster Rating: –
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Review: There was no poster immediately available for my review. Should one become available in the future, this section will be updated.
Trailer Rating: D+
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Review: For a science-fiction film, having your audio so quiet that it’s impossible to hear the details with overtuning your volume control is a poor choice. That nothing in the trailer gives the audience an actual idea of what’s really going on or why they should care is another big hurdle.
Oscar Prospects:
None.
Trailer #1
This Day in Oscar History: November 21 (2020)
Here’s what happened today in Oscar History.
Born
Died
Released
Film Preview: The Kid Detective (2020)
Page Revisions:
(November 15, 2020) Original
Release Date:
October 16, 2020
Synopsis:
From IMDb: “A once-celebrated kid detective, now 32, continues to solve the same trivial mysteries between hangovers and bouts of self-pity. Until a naive client brings him his first ‘adult’ case, to find out who brutally murdered her boyfriend.”
Poster Rating: C
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Review: The excess of open white space draws attention to the uninteresting artwork at the center of the design that feels partly real and partly fake, making it all a bit hamfisted.
Trailer Rating: C-
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Review: This looks like something you might find on television in the 1990s. The concept isn’t very original and the whole affair struggles to get anything across that makes it new fangled enough to be interesting.
Oscar Prospects:
None.
Trailer #1
Oscar in Box Office History (Week 47, 2020)
Every week, we’ll take a look back in 5-year intervals at the box office past to explore how Oscar’s nominees were doing at the box office each weekend historically. The first section under each year is the positioning of all Oscar nominees during that weekend at the box office (as well as a section looking at the inflation-adjusted numbers). The third section is an alphabetical list of those films and the categories in which they were nominated. And to start each week off, we’ll be looking at the films releasing over the weekend that have the best chance of getting Oscar nominations and specifying the categories where we think they have the best shots at this stage of the game. If you have any suggestions for more data you’d like to see, please let us know.
This Year: Potential Oscar Nominees Releasing This Weekend
None
The Friday Face-Off, Losers Bracket Round One #15
Below are our face-offs for this week. Choose the better winner in each category. For more information on how the game works, click here.
This Day in Oscar History: November 20 (2020)
Here’s what happened today in Oscar History.
Born
Died
Released
Poll: Remaking Best Original Screenplay, 2000
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Remaking Best Original Screenplay, 2000
In our eleventh pass of the Oscar nominees from 1997 through 2016, we take a look at the nominees for Best Original Screenplay. Each week, we’ll present a list of contenders from which you can select five to make up the Best Original Screenplay slate. There will be an “Other” option, but you can only use this once and you’ll have to specify your other in the comments. Now on to the game: Best Original Screenplay.
Loading ...Film Preview: A Perfectly Normal Family (2020)
Page Revisions:
(November 15, 2020) Original
Release Date:
October 2, 2020
Synopsis:
From IMDb: “Emma has a perfectly normal family until one day it turns out her dad, Thomas, is transgender. As Thomas becomes Agnete, both father and daughter struggle to hold on to what they had while accepting that everything has changed.”
Poster Rating: –
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Review: There was no poster immediately available for my review. Should one become available in the future, this section will be updated.
Trailer Rating: C+
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Review: My major issue with this trailer is that the couple are getting a divorce because the father wants to wear dresses. It is a hamfisted way of saying that the father has identified as female and want to live their natural life. The rest of the trailer tries very hard to sell this as a film about young children learning to accept their parents for who they are with a strong undercurrent of tone-deafness.
Oscar Prospects:
None.
Trailer #1
5 Favorites Redux #55: Favorite Nicolas Cage Films
Welcome to 5 Favorites. Each week, I will put together a list of my 5 favorites (films, performances, whatever strikes my fancy) along with commentary on a given topic each week, usually in relation to a specific film releasing that week.
Starting out his career with his more famous Coppola surname, Nicolas Cage appeared in a number of popular films, though he was seldom seen as great prior to his work in Moonstruck, which re-defined his pre-Oscar career. From Moonstruck through to Adaptation. and his Oscar-winning performance in Leaving Las Vegas in between, Cage was a hit-or-miss actor who had plenty of hits and plenty of cash grabs, but hardly the execrable career that would follow after his Oscar win. After his box office success with National Treasure in 2004, his career took a decidedly downward turn with numerous disastrous performances in throw-away films peppered with the occasional well-regarded flick like Kick-Ass or Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. With almost 100 credits in his almost 40-year career, a dud here or there is to be expected, but with roughly 40% of his films coming from the 22-year period between his cinematic debut in 1982 and his last major box office triumph in 2004 (National Treasure) and the remainder from 2004 through 2020, a 16-year period, it’s safe to say that Cage no longer cares about what he stars in and we’re certainly not likely to see his career choices improve in the near future.
This weekend will see the release of another genre pic with Cage in the cast. Jiu Jitsu is a sci-fi film about an alien traveler who comes to Earth periodically to challenge a Jiu Jitsu master or else he will wipe out all of humanity. It looks about as dumb as its premise sounds. That said, there’s no question that Cage was once capable of great acting and he may still be if he ever takes challenging projects in the future. For now, let’s look back at his pre-fallow career with my five favorite films starring Nicolas Cage.
Oscar Profile #523: Ray Milland
Born January 3, 1907 in Neath, Glamorgan, Wales, UK, Reginald Alfred John Truscott-Jones, known professionally as Ray Milland, was the son of a steel mill superintendent and his wife. He trained as an equestrian on his uncle’s horse breeding farm and later joined the Household Cavalry before becoming an actor.
Turning to acting, Milland’s rise was slow but steady. He made his British film debut in an uncredited role in 1928’s Moulin Rouge. In 1929, he had an uncredited role in the classic Piccadilly, his first credited role in The Lady from the Sea, and his first starring role in The Flying Scotsman which brought him to Hollywood under a nine month contract with MGM.
In Hollywood, Milland met Muriel Webster, a student at USC where he was taking some classes. They married in 1932 and remained married until his death, having had two children. Except for a high-profile role as Charles Laughton’s nephew in Payment Deferred, the actor’s early Hollywood career wasn’t advancing, so he returned temporarily to England while his wife stayed home to continue her studies.
Back in Hollywood in 1934 under contract to Paramount, the actor had solid supporting roles in 1934’s Bolero, We’re Not Dressing, and Charlie Chan in London on loan-out to Fox. His career advanced with 1935’s The Gilded Lily in which he was third billed behind Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. It was, however, his loan-out to Universal for their megahit 1936 Deanna Durbin film, Three Smart Girls, that convinced Paramount to give him his first romantic lead in 1937’s Easy Living opposite Jean Arthur.