Posts Tagged ‘Oscars’

Hmmm, yes, it’s that time of year again – regular Picturenose, Expatica and European Film Awards readers will already know how ‘successful’ I normally am when it comes to picking the film, players, director and writers ahead of the most glittering night in the cinematic calendar. Will my predictions for 22 February 2009 be any more accurate, one wonders? Only one way to find out…

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[photopress:counterfeiters.jpg,thumb,alignleft] Blood money

It’s always a difficult call, making movies about the greatest atrocity in the history of mankind, namely the Shoah (Holocaust). After all, it can be argued, what right do we have, as mere spectators, to be ‘entertained’ by the recounting of events that, quite simply, cast doubt on the very existence of the God worshipped by the Jewish community, including the six million who were slaughtered in the Final Solution?

It is a fair question, and probably why recent previous efforts (such as Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), or The Pianist (2002) by Roman Polanski) have had their adulators and detractors.

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Store men

In an effort to be absolutely bang up-to-date here on Picturenose, I thought it would be a good idea to review a movie I managed to miss for a good 14 years. I don’t think it necessarily matters, though. You could see it for the first time tomorrow and it would be certain to entertain you in some way. While certain topics are hardly current (the quite delicious discussion of The Return of the Jedi (1983) for example), the dialogue really is the selling point for this ultra-low budget affair, which cost only around $54,000 to produce.

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Today’s news starts with something I found quite surprising. In this Associated Press piece on backstage.com, the late Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker in the upcoming The Dark Knight (2008) is compared (favourably) to one Mr J Nicholson’s turn in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). They even go so far as to suggest he may even be nominated posthumously for an Oscar for his efforts. Regular readers will know what a huge fan of the new Batman I am – but I can’t help but wonder if it’s going to be that good a performance. True, he was shaping up to be a very fine actor indeed and his death was a loss to cinema – but a comic-book creation? I think that’d be a first (unless of course you, the reader, know different).

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Black gold, black hearts, bloody masterpiece

At the risk of being unbearably smug, reviewing films for a living can be an absolutely wonderful occupation – and 2008 would appear to be shaping up into one of the best years for flicks in living memory.

The latest proof of that particular pudding? Paul Thomas Anderson, who has previously given the world Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Magnolia (1999) and Boogie Nights (1997), has outdone himself with his adaptation of the Upton Sinclair novel Oil! and, in Daniel Day-Lewis as the morally ambiguous, Machiavellian early US oil baron, Daniel Plainview, the medium itself has been elevated.

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