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Mitch Cyrus

winters-bone

 Next up on our tour of movies nominated for Best Picture is “Winter’s Bone”, the darling of last year’s Sundance Festival that has became much more popular as a DVD than it was in the theaters, where it only grossed $6.4 million, almost a third of what the next lowest film, “127 Hours” grossed.  But its crawl towards the spotlight has been a steady one, and the film is now the Indie star of this year’s Oscars, garnering three major nominations; Best Picture, Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence) and Best Supporting Actor (John Hawkes).

The story itself is relatively simple.  Seventeen year old Ree Dolly (Lawrence) is the de facto head of her dirt poor family in the backwoods of the Missouri Ozarks.  Her mother has had an emotional breakdown and is in a near zombie state, and her father is awaiting trial for manufacturing methamphetamine, seemingly the only way to make money in this cauldron of abject poverty.  This leaves Ree as the only caregiver to not only her invalid mother, but also her ten year old brother and six year old sister.

 As if this wasn’t already enough of a burden for such a young girl, she receives an early visit from the sheriff (Garret Dillahunt, like Hawkes another recognizable face from “Deadwood”).  It seems that her father, who was out on bail, has gone missing.  If he does not show up for the trial, bail will be revoked, and the Dolly family will be put out, as the deadbeat father put the family farm down as collateral.  Ree barely bats an eye as she immediately shows that she is made of sterner stuff than most.  “I’ll find him”.

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Mitch Cyrus

The_Kids_are_All_RightThe Oscar nominated film “The Kids Are All Right” plays like a feature film version of one of those quirky comedy/dramas you see all of the time on HBO or Showtime.  This makes perfect sense when you learn that director Lisa Cholodenko has directed episodes of “Six Feet Under”, “The L Word”, and “Hung”.  It’s all about family dynamics in these cable shows, a theme that Cholodenko exports to the big screen.  It’s just a pretty big switch on the makeup of the family; a lesbian couple and their two teenage children.

Nic (Annette Bening), a doctor, and Jules (Julianne Moore), a free spirit still undecided as to what she wants to be when she grows up, have a loving relationship with each other and their two children.  Each woman bore one of the children, using sperm from the same anonymous donor, so that they are at least biologically half-siblings.  Joni (Mia Wasikowska) is a senior in high school, getting ready to be the first to leave the nest, while Laser (Josh Hutcherson) is 15, and dealing with all the “fun” of the early years of high school.

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Mitch Cyrus

oscar-aka-academy-award

 

The Oscar presentations are this Sunday, and as is our tradition here at TheClevelandFan.com, we use the week running up to the Sunday telecast to take a closer look at the contenders for Best Picture, culminating with the always popular Oscar Predictions column Sunday morning (I only wish my predictions concerning sporting teams were as good as the ones I make for Oscar).

This year, I’m choosing not to re-run the reviews that I’ve already published.  They’re on the Movies page, and not hard to find.  But what I will do is start out my Best Picture Nominees articles with a summarization of those five, as well as a link for those of you who don’t want to dig through the archives.  And then starting tomorrow running through Saturday, I’ll post full reviews on four of the other ten films that are up for the award.

For you math majors, it’s pretty obvious that 5 + 4 ≠ 10.  Yes, there is a movie that I will be skipping conducting a full review…which I’ll talk about at the end of this article.

 2010 was indeed a very strange year for movies.  Right until the last few months of the year, it was one of the worst I had ever seen; lame remakes and bad sequels galore, with nary a glimmer of quality to be seen, other than in the form of two of the nominees: “Inception” and “Toy Story 3”.  But once Autumn arrived, so did the quality movies.  Enough so that I truly think all ten of these films deserve their nominations…as opposed to last year when there were three of them that didn’t belong.

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Mitch Cyrus

Crystalball

What a putrid last month of movies we had in January.  It was as bad as I’ve ever seen, and I’m used to bad Januarys…just not on this level of suck.

 Well brace yourselves, because February is stacking up to be almost as bad, without even a charming romantic comedy that my wife might enjoy (trust me, she has no desire to see Adam Sandler as a serial liar trying to pick up a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model).

The only good thing I can tell you is that March is looking pretty decent.

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News and Rumors

 Several new blurbs to put in for this month.

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Mitch Cyrus

The_Mechanic

In my Crystal Ball for January, I warned that this month was shaping up to be one of the worst I’d ever seen in terms of quality movies.  But at that time, I at least held out hope for a couple of films.  One of them was “The Way Back”, an attempt for an epic “escape” film about six men held in a Siberian Gulag who escaped, and walked all the way to India, a journey of 4,000 miles.

It was directed by Peter Weir, the great director from such films as “Witness”, “The Truman Show”, and “Dead Poets Society”, and had a terrific cast with Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, and young Saoirse Ronan, so I had high hopes.

It was a complete bore, and totally unworthy of wasting one more sentence about.

So that was one of my two “Movies That I’m Anticipating” for the month.  The other was the action adventure “The Mechanic”, a remake of the not-so-classic 1972 film starring Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent.

And like the Cleveland Cavaliers; I am now 0 for January.

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