Saturday Speaks (and Links): Cabin Fever Edition

On Saturday Morning

I'm getting out of the house today. That's for sure. I haven't worked in two weeks. Here in my little section of East Tennessee, snow has accumulated on five separate occasions in the past 13 days. Yesterday, the sun came out. We broke 45 degrees. The melt began.

But I'm getting out of the house to see my first movie released in 2015, though I'm not sure what yet. Don't worry, you'll know soon enough.

When I Was Thirty: Back to the Future Trilogy

Back at the end of last September, my wife pooled all of our close friends and family together to buy me Blu-ray trilogies. We decided that we would do one trilogy per month. 

I've done three of these posts so far ("LOTR", "Bourne", and "Oceans"). In those, I feel I tried to act like something I'm not. By that, I mean I actually tried to watch and review special features. The truth is: I don't really have time for that with all of these, I've found. I've decided to focus on what I love about these movies from here on out. How they connect to me, and, really, to all of us. Digging out themes is what I really love to do. I'm not doing consumer reviews here. I'm sharing a love of classic American cinematic trilogies. 

So, I'm not gonna really review the extras, I'll just list what's available, whether I get to watch them or not. If I get to watch them, as was totally necessary with LOTR, I will comment. 

For this one, let's get it out of the way now: the "Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy" Blu-ray is beautiful. The movies looks great, they sound great, and there are hours upon hours of featurettes and makings-of and interviews and archive footages and commentaries, even a documentary about the physics of the films. I will watch some of this eventually. 

Thursday Movie Picks: Father-Son Relationships

Fathers and sons don't always see eye-to-eye. In fact, some men have no relationship with their fathers...period, many by choice. These three are fathers that are there for their sons but not really there, you know? These are stories of emotionally distant men with second chances but only if father and son, and even if they don't know it, can trust in each other enough to work together.

It's the return of the All in the Family Edition of Wandering through the Shelves' Thursday Movie Picks. This time biologically related fathers and sons.

Blind Spot 2015: Fitzcarraldo

Created and hosted by Ryan McNeil at The Matinee

A little less than a third of the way into Werner Herzog's 1982 epic "Fitzcarraldo," our hero, played by the fierce Klaus Kinski, answers a question posed to him by a land surveyor from whom he is purchasing a large parcel of Peruvian jungle. The man asks him, "Do you really know what you're doing?" Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, or as the natives call him, 'Fitzcarraldo', answers, "We're going to do what nobody's ever done."

I would imagine that if that same question was asked to German auteur Werner Herzog upon pitching the idea to make this film, he would've said the exact same thing.

Most filmmakers simply make films. They tell stories with lights and cameras and sound stages and backlots and actors in secure, protected environments. They do a great job. We love these movies.

Werner Herzog creates experiences grounded in danger and mystery, true adventures complete with unexpected elements and settings and untrained actors. Then, he films them. We can't fathom how this sort of thing is even possible. And we love these too.

7 Reasons Why: The 87th Academy Awards

I made my Oscar predictions too soon. One week before the big show. At that point, eight days gone now, I was still under the impression that Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" was gonna take the big Best Picture prize and lose everywhere else but Supporting Actress, which was a lock.

I ended up doing just okay with my predictions and still won the ballot at my particular Oscar party. I landed only 16 out of 24 categories. Of course, my biggest miss being that Best Picture win for Alejandro G. Iñárritu's "Birdman." I don't care. I'm glad it won.

The Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts

A shot from the short film, "Parvaneh"

Earlier this week, I noticed that my local art house theater was running the Oscar Nominated Short Films, both Animated and Live Action. I couldn't fit both into my schedule, but I was able to catch the five nominated Live Action Shorts, and I was so impressed.

All of these films tell beautiful stories. Stories of friendship and family and history, and they do so in minute amounts of time. I actually fell in love with a few of these. You will find a personal ranking and predictions at the end of my mini-reviews. They are reviewed in the order they played, which, I have to say, is a genius sequence. This was very well-thought out.

Twenty Years of Oscar: Achievement in Directing

At some point in the late 1990s, probably around '97/'98, I began to realize that there was this job called film director and that it was these creative geniuses that drove the storytelling aspect of movies. Steven Spielberg was my first love. I wanted so much to see all of his movies. I began to learn about filmmaking through him and his love of it. I read about him constantly. "Saving Private Ryan" came to theaters. I went...twice. I was blown away by its power, its greatness.

I got into some Scorsese, "Goodfellas and "Casino." Then, I saw Paul Thomas Anderson's "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia." I became obsessed with the camera. I began to see the differences in directors' various styles.

I began to understand what made a "Best Director" for the first time.

All of the movies mentioned below are Oscar choices that I just fully agree with. Most of these are for "groundbreaking," even controversial films. All of them are visually masterful pieces of cinema from truly visionary filmmakers.

Twenty Years of Oscar: Actor in a Leading Role

I want to go ahead and get something out of the way: I love Tom Hanks. Now, he didn't make this list because I'm in constant struggle about "Forrest Gump" and whether it's actually a great movie or not. I haven't seen it in years, and I fear it may not be as powerful as I once considered it to be. Also, while his win as Gump was deserved, I am still bitter about his loss in 1998 to that Italian Jumping Bean guy. If Hanks had won for "Saving Private Ryan," he would be on this list.

Anyway, we've reached Day Three in my "Twenty Years of Oscar" extravaganza. Best Actor...it's a biggie. And it is so often one of the tightest races each year. Some are runaways, including most of the picks you'll find below, but it always finds itself a hot topic this time a year. This year, especially. Can't wait 'til Sunday.

Thursday Movie Picks: Oscar Winning Movies

Oscar is in the air. "The mood is tense!"...sort of. This week's edition of the Wandering through the Shelves Thursay Movie Picks Meme is all about "the big enchilada, ya dig?" You know, Best Picture, the last one of the night. But Oscar gives out more than one "Best Picture." Yeah, to spread it around, there's a category for Best Foreign Language Film and one for Best Animated Feature. Since it's an option and I'm doing another Best Picture post this weekend, I've decided to go ahead and spread it around myself. I'm giving you a favorite from each of the aforementioned Oscar categories, in order.

Twenty Years of Oscar: Screenplay

So, OK. Anyone who knows Oscar knows about "The Big Five," which are Writing, Directing, Actress, Actor, and Picture. Only a few films have won them all in the same year: "It Happened One Night" (1934), "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975), and "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991). Most recently, "American Beauty" (1999) got close, winning four of the five. Annette Bening got beat out for Best Actress.

Anyway, this is the first in a series of posts that will contain "Top Five" lists on the "Big Five Academy Awards" categories. We start...with writing.

The Academy Award for Writing...there are two. One for an Original work, conceived for the screen alone. The second for an Adaptation, something not initially thought of as a movie.

Since 1994, there have been some absolutely groundbreaking scripts written, several of which have actually changed movies for the better forever. Those are the ones I tried to capture here. Surely, there are many more than ten great scripts in the past twenty years, but these are the ones that meant something to me, and, from my perspective, movies, in general.

Twenty Years of Oscar: If Speaks Picked Best Picture, Part II

I left the last post with a question: What does that say about me? The fact that I only agree with two of the ten Best Picture winners from 1994-2003. I think that's about like everybody else. The movie Oscar picks is not always the one that stands the test of time.

So, we continue...

Twenty Years of Oscar: If Speaks Picked Best Picture, Part I

Each year, we get a list of movies deemed by Hollywood to be the best of the year. For most of my life, this was a short list of five films.

A few years ago, Oscar decided to stop being so elitist and allow up to ten Best Picture nominees. I say do ten if you can do ten. Alas, we've gotten random numbers recently. Nine one year. Eight this year.

For the 1995 show, celebrating the year in movies 1994, I was ten years old. It was the first Oscar telecast I remember watching. It was also the first year I remember actually seeing a movie I loved in the theater win the Best Picture Oscar. I was hooked. The movie was Robert Zemeckis' "Forrest Gump."

I've decided to do a series of posts this week dedicated to the past twenty years of Oscar. There will be posts on what I would've picked, ranked lists of winners I liked in certain categories. General Oscar worship-type stuff. It must be done. The Academy Awards, especially the Best Picture award, is what got me into movies. And you'll find this post and the others to be quite autobiographical.

Well, Not Quite Everything

"The Theory of Everything"     ★★★

A Review by Kevin Powers

My lack of certainty about whether or not I would like director James Marsh's Stephen Hawking biopic "The Theory of Everything" led it to last place in my rankings of the Best Picture Oscar nominees before I even saw it. Having said that, it's still in eighth place. 

It's not a bad movie. In fact, I was quite moved by it. It's gorgeously composed, boasting top-notch cinematography, editing, and production design. The score by Johann Johannsson is the best of the year, and fans of the film should be proud when it wins that category. 

"The Theory of Everything" is a movie that wants to have everything, to be about everything, featuring a character in Hawking who wants to solve everything, yet, like its hero, it doesn't succeed. And the movie itself is just way too nice.

Speaks' Predictions: The 87th Academy Awards

With the 87th Academy Awards telecast just one week away, I thought I'd go ahead and get out my rundown of most of the categories.

This year marks my twentieth go round with the Oscars. The first one I remember aired in 1995, for the year in movies, 1994. "Pulp Fiction" and "Forrest Gump," two movies that I still cherish to this day. Of course, I never saw "Pulp Fiction" until years later. At ten, my Mom wasn't ready to let me watch something quite that violent. But, man, do I remember that show. David Letterman hosted. The famous "Uma"/"Oprah" bit and whatnot. Tom Hanks won the Best Actor Oscar for the second time in two years.

I became obsessed with movie montages. In fact, when I think about the Academy Awards telecast, that's what I see. A movie montage of movie montages, laughs, nice dresses and tuxes, good times. This year's ceremony is poised to be a winner with Neil Patrick Harris at the helm.

I feel like, really there's not a lot missing here. I think Ava DuVernay could easily have been nominated for Best Director in the place of Bennett Miller, and, having recently re-watched "The Grand Budapest Hotel," which leads (tied with "Birdman") the pack with 9 nominations, I have just one question: Where is Ralph Fiennes? Anyway, I'm excited to see who ends up winning big.

Thursday Movie Picks: Unrequited Love

I'm going with flights of whimsy this week, peeps. Fun and happy stuff, for the most part.

Unrequited love, as a topic, is near and dear to me. I'm pretty sure we've all felt it. I certainly have. It hurts, but it doesn't have to be a sad and sappy thing. Since I equate this topic with youth, that's where I'm going with it.

I feel I'm sensing a trend with the topics over at Wandering through the Shelves' Thursday Movie Picks here in the last few weeks. Oh, yes. Valentine's Day is nigh.

Movies from 2014 (That I Haven't Talked About), Part III

I'm getting busier and busier these days. The STATE TESTS (ugh!) are coming down the line at work and golf season (I coach our middle school team) is getting started. I fear my writing will most likely be relegated to short catching-up sort of posts like this. But that's OK, I think. I'm at a point in the year where I'm able to watch more than I can write about.

C'est la vie.

Thursday Movie Picks: Romantic Comedies

Love is in the air again for this week's installment of Wandering through the Shelves' Thursday Movie Picks.

The "Romantic Comedies" -- When done right, they can become your favorite movies. The sad thing is that so many aren't done right. It's a genre that can easily become cheesy and predictable. The best ones have to find the right blend of truth, charm, a touch of drama, and real human comedy. Care must be given to how a romantic comedy ends. Too much perfection is cheap. Too little is devastating.

I feel I've picked a few this week that find the right blend of those aspects. They are true and charming, dramatic and comedic. They are perfect movies.