my opinion matters

Last night, I watched Arrival , nominated for Best Picture and a slew of other awards this year. Starring Amy Adams and the guy who plays Hawkeye (unconvincingly as a physicist), it’s basically the story of how Earth will react when aliens come to visit. Although it sounds like it, this is not an action movie, and that’s a surprising twist. In general, the nominees for Best Picture are a collection of some of the most depressing and weird movies that would otherwise never been seen by the general public. And once they upped the possible nominees to 10 films per year, I hoped that would mean more mainstream or palatable movies would start to be nominated. Last year, the big surprise nomination was The Martian , even though it was never going to win. And Spotlight was a great movie and everything, but it’s not exactly an upper. None of the Best Picture nominees really are. And it’s been that way as long as I can remember.   There is an upside to this, of course. If you’re like...

Sometimes you read a book you loved and then almost immediately forget everything you just read. Sometimes you read a book you hated and remember it forever. When I read The Girl on the Train , I had to tell everyone how great it was. It was before I read Gone Girl and realized there is an actual genre of "psychological-thrillers-where-you-have-no-idea-what's-happening-and-then-it-gets-awesome-and-the-ending-is-crazy" - it's a thing. Anyway, the problem became that whenever I tried to tell anyone what it was about, that was the only way I could describe it. I couldn't tell anyone what it was really about because then they would know and the book wouldn't be amazing for them. Not that I don't like spoilers - I do, probably too much - but in this case if I knew the ending ahead of time, I wouldn't have cared as much while I was reading it and trying to figure out what happened. Then, inexplicably, I completely forgot the entire book. I couldn't re...

In anticipation for the Oscars (with the fall of pirate bay I was behind and didn't get to watch anything before the globes), I have now seen several nominated or potentially nominated films, and I have been pleasantly surprised. Last year, most of the movies were, for lack of a better word, dull. Yes, Into the Woods was weird and boring, but some of the others have been fantastic. And don't get me wrong, I love musicals as much as the next person - actually, I love musicals more than the next person. Rent , Chicago, Cats , Phantom, Book of Mormon, you name it, I usually love it. But Into the Woods was just bizarre. I saw a televised stage production of it with Bernadette Peters in college and loved it, so I assumed the movie would be that much better. But apparently college me was stupid and thought the songs were good when they were actually terrible. Sondheim rules, but not this time - the lyrics are ridiculous and sound like a third grader wrote them. And I'm telling ...