GRACE MICHAUD! OH HOW WE MISSED YOU

I know I know.
A week has been too long! So you're probably wondering:

Grace, did you intern at all this week?

 As it turns out, a lot of things came up preventing me from doing so. But all is alright, because it's OSCAR WEEK EVERYONE!



Ok ok ok so I have quite to blog about.

Last Saturday I went to Day 1 of the AMC theaters Best Picture showcase. As in, they showed the first four movies nominated for Best Picture at this year's Oscars. I went with my lovely friend Erika Panzerino. That's right folks, we watched four movies from 11am to 9:30 pm. And was it awesome? You know it! Not only did we get $5 gift cards just for coming, but we got these official looking passes too!

Legit.

First on the agenda was Steven Spielberg's War Horse. The film is set during World War I (aka the Great War that inspired the writings of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald) in Britain. A boy forms a heart-warming bond with Joey the horse. Long story short the horse gets sold into the battlefield (to my boy Tom Hiddleston). The rest of the movie follows the journey of the horse to get back home to his owner through several different scenarios. Now it may seem really cheesy. And yes, yes it is. But Erika and I both agree that it was our favorite of the day. I loved it for several reasons. One, I loved all the actors.

Yes. I loved the actors.

 Have I mentioned that I love the actors and had a fit during one scene that I am not going to spoil because this is a spoil-free blog?

Second: the cinematography was breathtaking. But you know me, I'm a sucker for wide shots of Birtish landscapes as the next guy. Third: it's an epic film. No seriously, it's an epic. Good old fashion Spielberg. Lastly, I loved it because if you are like me and can't handle intense and gory war movies (left the room during the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan only to be haunted again by it in US History three years later why life), then this movie is a perfect demonstration of why war is absolutely terrible and awful and you question how we even still engage in it. I mean that one was to end all wars but hey, twenty years later we're going to make a second one. There's one scene that's really powerful. At one point the horse, Joey, gets tangled in barbed wire in the middle on no man's land. A British solider and a German solider both work together to free it. Now yes that sounds cheesy but the scene is done perfectly. The two soldiers are tense, but engage in conversation like two ordinary men. Two men who are both just human beings, forced to kill one another. Deep. Stuff. Seriously, this one is absolutely worth seeing, and deserves its place in Best Picture.

Next we we saw Money Ball. I already saw the film so I thought seeing it a second time, I would be really bored because it's not one of those movies (or so I believed) that you can see twice. I ended up enjoying in the second time around. If you know me and my family, then you know that I detest sports more than Kim Kardashian. I was not looking forward to seeing it. At all. I hate all sports movies. Rocky is overrated and I didn't even like Gracie; a movie about a girl with my name playing soccer (which is hilarious because I play soccer. HAAHAHAH oh irony you are funny). But Money Ball isn't really an inspirational sports movie in a sense. It's just a well made movie. The dialogue flows quick and sharp. Brad Pitt, I will say, pulled off acting like a normal human being.

Looking at him you wouldn't know he has six children half being from different countries with a formally insane woman. You wouldn't!

 Jonah Hill is alright, he's got a few good scenes but I don't think he deserved a Best Supporting Actor nod. Sure I had no idea what was going on half the time because I don't speak baseball or math, but after seeing it the second time I kind of get a general sense of it. A must see? Eh. A very well made movie. Worthy of Oscar? Not going to win. It was made well but so was War Horse and The Artist (which we will get to this Saturday) and they had way better stories. But Brad Pitt actually had to say something about that in an article on Entertainment Weekly :

For ­inspiration, Pitt and ­director Bennett Miller looked to a time when filmmakers were as suspicious of the established rules 
as Beane is. ''I love this ­character because it's ­reminiscent to me of '70s films,'' says Pitt. ''Looking back at my favorites, it's All the President's Men, it's Dog Day Afternoon. In the late 
'80s and '90s, we got caught up in this idea that a character had to learn a lesson and be someone else in the end. If you look at the '70s films
 I was weaned on, it's not [the character] that changed, 
it's the world around them — just sent it off its axis 
a few degrees. That's what I saw in Moneyball.''

This poster literally explains the whole freakin movie

WHAT AM I EVEN WATCHING

NOW THAT BRINGS US TO THE ONE MOVIE LUCKY ENOUGH TO GIVE ME A HEADACHE.WHY AM I WRITING IN CAPS? BECAUSE THIS MOVIE IS SO FRUSTRATING IT IS WORTHY OF SPEAKING IN CAPS. I'M TALKING ABOUT THE TREE OF LIFE HERE. Oh my goodness. Now I knew a lot about this movie pre-nomination. It got booed at the Cannes festival, and was rejected by audiences everywhere but loved by critics. I heard it was about creation and growing up or something like that but I really got no story line. Now I finally got to see this oh-so controversial movie. You know how in movies they'll show a montage of clips involving the character to background music? Maybe some voice over? Ok that is the entire movie but with a 20 minute sequence of the creation of Earth. Then they throw in some random dinosaur scene that literally has nothing to do with the entire movie. Then we just watch glimpses of this kid's like in the 1950's, and then sometimes we'll see his present self just walking around aimlessly. And the whole time people whisper. And you're just waiting for something to happen...and nothing does. Right when you think it ends...BOOM it keeps going and you find yourself more interested in if your brother is feeding the dog or not. You know how like, in TV shows a character will drag the other characters to an "artsy" film where it's just shots of stupid things that have no connection? Yeah. That was this artsy film.

Now I can't tell if I hated it or not. It was well made. I really want to know how they filmed the creation scenes, and if it was CGI then heck, those were awesome. The music was wonderful, as well as Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain (both of which are nominated for Oscars but not for this movie). I in a way get the movie. You don't need a story because the film is about...well...life. Life itself is a story, even if it is not planned exactly to the bone. We just sit, and we wait. Movies, at least Oscar movies, should make you think. Tree of Life? That makes you think. Hard. Like the age old question: What does life mean to me?



But oh...it was so long. Too long. Way too long. Once I got the true meaning (or at least believed I did, I'm trying to make myself seem smart here) then I got sick of it. I was resisting the urge to just scream OH BE DONE WITH IT ALREADY. It didn't help to put weird afterlife scenes in there either. When it finally was finished, the entire audience just went ugh. No one clapped.

 Interesting? I think so? Best Picture? Hard to say, because it is definitely gutsy and different, but maybe I don't like its yeah-mainstream-is-too-stupid-to-get-this-film attitude. But it makes you think...tough one. Tough. One.

Erika and I were so annoyed by the movie that during our hour-long dinner break we got lost because we couldn't turn left to get to Taco Bell. It was just such a frustrating movie. It really was.

But after one burrito and some Sour Patch Kids, we headed into our final film for the day. The Descendants. This was again, my second time seeing it (actually the first time I saw it I went by myself and was the only person in the theater under the age of 65...NO REGRETS). There is not much to say about this movie, only that I liked George Clooney in it a lot and feel he is seriously underused as a narrator. When he spoke, despite the chaos in his life, he really made you feel calm, about everything. Shailene Woodley? Yeah the preggers girl on The Secret Life of the American Teenager? She was good. Not good as in good for a teen soap star, but I mean good for any actress. I liked the juxtaposition of how Hawaii is the backdrop to this story that is no vacation. I really thought it could give The Artist a run for its money, until I went to this Oscar talk at the Jacob Burns Center (a post I'll be saving for day of Oscars thank you very much). The story is very...overboard. My wife is in a coma! And she's cheating on me! One of my kids drinks and does drugs! My other kid swears and is a bully! To add to the fire I have to sell this huge piece of land for millions of dollars! And oh yeah, I'm secretly a millionaire but I like to keep it real by only using money from my law practice! From that perspective I realize that maybe this wasn't what I cracked it out to be. But it was written well enough that I connected and believed these characters without seeing the over dramatics of it all. So that in itself makes it a good movie because you're just consumed by the movie. The climax (if it can be considered as such) is predictable, but the ending is sweet. A tear-jerker if you are feeling really sensitive.

AND FUN FACT! One of the screen writers for this film (and is also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay) is none other than Jim Rash.

Yeah...the Dean on Community

So day one is over! And I have seen seven of the nine Best Picture nominees. I just have Hugo and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close left. I'll be seeing them again Saturday when we take on Day 2! YES!

Good night folks!