2018 Oscar Nominated Short Films.

It’s a new year so once again we made our way to the balcony of the Hollywood Theater to see the Oscar Nominated Shorts. This is the Portland Hollywood, not California. It’s a neighborhood on the east side of the river, bisected by Sandy Boulevard, and the theater is the last surviving Portland example of the architecture that used to be common for cinema palaces. It has an ornate exterior ... Read more »

2019 Live Action Short Subject Academy Award Nominees

What a dismal afternoon at the movies. There is not a humorous one in the bunch. Only one of them offers any hope at all; the rest are so dark you want to suck a gas pipe when you come out of the show. I went back over the list of nominees and winners for the last decade or so, most of which we have seen, and every year there has been a majority of films that make you feel good in one way ... Read more »

2046

(China, Hong Kong, France, Italy, Germany, 2004) The director, Wong Kar-wai, is a well-respected auteur with a big international following. We thought we’d give him a try, and we did, for about 40 minutes. It was too slow, too obscure, and not at all interesting, though some of the photography was beautiful.

21

They like to say that a movie was based on true events. I’d say this one was more “inspired by,” since it changes almost everything. In other words, this is almost 100% bullshit. There really was an MIT blackjack team (actually, several of them over the years) and they really did do well. But they never made $100,000 or more in a single night, as we see here. That would have been stupid. ... Read more »

21 Days

Later re-titled as 21 Days Together. Also known as Three Weeks Together and The First and the Last, which was the original title of the source, a short story and play by John Galsworthy. Seems like nobody could make up their minds about this one.

I was trying to figure out if this movie was pre-Scarlett ... Read more »

21 Grams

Films aren’t novels, even if they have been made from novels. Each form has its strengths and weaknesses, and particularly in movies, the way is story is told can be as important to me as the story itself. In fact, a different way of telling can rescue what might have been a routine story, if told routinely. Good examples: Read more »

21 Jump Street

For some reason I thought this was critically panned, then found out that it did pretty well with both reviewers and the audience. Maybe I got it mixed up with an Adam Sandler piece of celluloid dog vomit. I never saw the TV show, which is usually a good thing when they make a movie out of the TV show, because I don’t have any expectations. All I really knew about it was that this was the ... Read more »

22 Jump Street

Every once in a while a movie leaves me groping for a new word to describe the awfulness of it. Grim? Gruesome? Not quite bad enough. Jaw-droppingly, synapse-shatteringly, bone-breakingly, head-explodingly, bowel-looseningly, I’d-rather-get-ebola-than-watch-this-again awful? That comes close, I guess. Here’s an example of how bad it is: The end credits were far funnier than anything that ... Read more »

28 Days Later

Good SF movie that loses steam toward the end. But there is some fantastic imagery. Worth seeing.

28 Weeks Later

(2007) Here’s a sequel that subscribes to the “The last was one pretty bloody, so let’s make this one even bloodier” school of sequel-making. 28 Days Later was pretty good until the last twenty minutes, when it degenerated into a ho-hum bloodbath. So they started this one with a bloodbath, and had another every twenty minutes. You begin to wonder how these ... Read more »