As a break from all this heavy stuff, I’m thinking that perhaps I should really watch the top twenty grossing movies in a particular year instead of the award darlings. But really, which is the worse punishment? That’s just going to be a lot of 15-word reviews.

Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling play Cindy and Dean, a couple we see at two points in their relationship. The getting together and the coming apart cut back and forth throughout the movie.

From a technical standpoint, I felt that the interplay between the two time periods did not come off all the way. Because it is a slower movie dealing with such heavy emotions, it often took a while to get into a specific scene. Then, once I was into the moment, that moment was over and I had to adjust to the next, opposite one. It didn’t come off that smoothly but all the scenes were definitely done well.

After mentioning the non-indie style of Rabbit Hole, I must smile at this return to indie land, what with the shaky, grainy camera shots and the awkward angles. I felt that this did a service for Ryan Gosling and didn’t do as much for Michelle Williams. Her younger Cindy was very effective, coming off as internally mixed up and problematic as a teenage girl should be. Her older Cindy had those edges blunted, or maybe just dulled, and wasn’t as interesting. To be fair, Dean is a character that had to be more consistent throughout the film, while Cindy is the one that changed from cut to cut.

If I Picked the Oscars 2011 (in order of my vote)

Best Actress:

• Natalie Portman (Black Swan)
• Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole)
• Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine)
• Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right)
• Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone)

Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart play a couple who are eight months removed from the accidental death of their son. You probably have a good idea what this means for the movie, and while it doesn’t really hit any radically different ground, the acting and the style of the movie manage to make it work.

The movie does well in widening the scope of this horrifying topic without losing sense of the center. We are all the stars of our own movies and the death of a child affects everyone, from the neighbors of the family to personal friends to every stranger who innocently asks, “Do you have kids?” The film puts forth their points of view in short, yet effective, bursts of screen time.

I’m typically not a Nicole Kidman fan, but she comes through here. She makes her character sympathetic, vulnerable, and understandable. Aaron Eckhart also shows a different side to his acting abilities. Instead of being a smarmy playboy, he is a warm, strong family man who is hurting and alone. The husband is not as well developed here as the female lead is, but he definitely has several powerful scenes. For me though, Dianne Wiest was the real stand out. Whenever she was in frame, I watched her.

I’m so used to seeing the indie-style applied, whether out of budgetary or artistic reasons, to movies like this. Rabbit Hole, however, looks like a movie with its rich lightening, lens choices, sets and environments. It made me remember that movies like this were once made like movies. The application felt new again.

If I Picked the Oscars 2011 (in order of my vote)

Best Actress:

• Natalie Portman (Black Swan)
• Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole)
• Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine)
• Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right)
• Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone)

I did see this on my television instead of on the big screen but this only served to emphasize the appropriateness of the film to live as a television miniseries.

The “smallness” of the movie is due to the choices of the filmmakers. The story of The King’s Speech plays out mainly in interiors and with a limited number of characters. In addition, the shots are all framed to emphasize walls and enclosures. Metaphor for the difficulties of a stuttering king? perhaps.

But it certainly made me wonder at the true impact of his speaking difficulties on his subjects and his nation. The film says that King George VI’s stutter became an ever growing issue as Europe rose to face the threat of Hitler. His speech made him seem weak.

As a military history nerd, you don’t need to tell me how important a strong and unifying leader is during a time of war. But when I watch such a story in a movie, I want to feel this importance.

The king (and as a prince previously) is shown making one uneasy public appearance after another. What is the risk/reward? What are the consequences of his awkwardness? From this movie, I’m not really sure. I want to feel his struggle and share in his eventual triumph. I don’t think this film helped me in any of this.

I have nothing but the highest regard for the abilities of Colin Firth after A Simple Man. I think the movie lets him down here. He and Jeff Bridges should have traded years.

If I Picked the Oscars 2011 (in order of my vote)

Best Picture:

• True Grit
• Black Swan
• Toy Story 3
• Inception
• Winter’s Bone
• The Social Network
• 127 Hours
• The Fighter
• The King’s Speech
• The Kids Are All Right

Best Actor

• Jeff Bridges (True Grit)
• James Franco (127 Hours)
• Colin Firth (The King’s Speech)
• Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network)
• Javier Bardem (Biutiful) have not seen

Those Coen brothers sure know filmmaking.

It is interesting that the classically Coen traits of quirkiness and dark comedy are less noticeably different within a Western.

The HBO TV series Deadwood already used interesting cadences and presentations of language within a Western, and the strange characters of this True Grit could have fit right into any Sergio Leone landscape, but the Coens string it all together. The characters are lively and our investments in each of them changes as the movie goes forth.

The acting is right on form from all the parties involved, and the classically Western shots of horses galloping across a vast landscape are just as breathtaking as they ought to be.

For all that though, there is just one sequence that clinched the movie’s longevity for me. Much like the now-legendary montage in Pixar’s Up, I continue to think about these few minutes and allow them to haunt me.

Like sci-fi, Westerns are so prime for the exploration of larger themes, and while I certainly can do that, the wonderful thing about this movie is that it can stand as great even if we probe no deeper than the surface.

One last note about acting. Two years ago, Colin Firth should have taken home the top acting prize for his amazing work in A Single Man, highly recommended. Instead, Jeff Bridges got the nod. This past year, Colin Firth got a make-up for A King’s Speech, when it really should have gone to Jeff Bridges for his portrayal here. It all evens out in the end, I suppose, but it really is no fun when people win for the wrong parts. The fans of the future lose out.

If I Picked the Oscars 2011 (in order of my vote)

Best Picture:

• True Grit
• Black Swan
• Toy Story 3
• Inception
• Winter’s Bone
• The Social Network
• 127 Hours
• The Fighter
• The King’s Speech
• The Kids Are All Right

Best Actor

• Jeff Bridges (True Grit)
• James Franco (127 Hours)
• Colin Firth (The King’s Speech)
• Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network)
• Javier Bardem (Biutiful) have not seen

I knew the story. I just had no idea how they were going to tell it as a movie.

It was a huge surprise to actually spend the majority of the film with Aron (and his arm) stuck immobile within a narrow crevice barely his body width. It took some guts for director Danny Boyle to go with this approach. A feature-length movie about one guy in one unchanging position? Yeah, I wouldn’t have bought that.

There is an opening section that brings Aron to the hike and tells us the type of guy he is. With James Franco at the helm, we learn that Ralston is a smart, capable guy with complete trust in himself. But still, he comes across as just a pretty normal guy that we could very well know in our own lives.

So once the accident happens and the film sticks us in this location with him, we’re in. It is not that hard to imagine ourselves there.

When the world is reduced to the length and width of your body’s reach, a lot of things become very focused. This really comes across. Huge victories are achieved in simply not dropping an object. Major set backs come when a bird doesn’t fly over.

The movie does reasonably well in making us feel the passage of time without letting things lag. But, I feel that we’re not allowed to suffer enough in the solitude. Five days is a long-time to contemplate one’s helplessness and impending demise. The film doesn’t reach close to what that must have been like.

But boy, when the time comes to do the arm severing, you better not be eating anything. Talk about a five-inch wide action scene.

Before watching 127 Hours, I doubt I would have had the courage to take Aron Ralston‘s course of action. After it though, I’m considering that I might be be able to at least consider it. This shift in my attitude tells me that Danny Boyle and James Franco certainly achieved some of their filmmaking goals for this movie. I’m disappointed that Danny Boyle didn’t get a Best Director nomination for executing his bold choices.

If I Picked the Oscars 2011 (in order of my vote)

Best Picture:

• True Grit
• Black Swan
• Toy Story 3
• Inception
• Winter’s Bone
• The Social Network
• 127 Hours
• The Fighter
• The King’s Speech
• The Kids Are All Right

Best Actor

• Jeff Bridges (True Grit)
• James Franco (127 Hours)
• Colin Firth (The King’s Speech)
• Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network)
• Javier Bardem (Biutiful) have not seen

That’s right. She’s 75 and the drive and ambition that you’ll see in this piece will put the most energetic of 20-something entrepreneurs to shame. In fact, her absolute need to work is the through-line of the film. I can’t help but think that the movie will speak especially well to today’s job-uncertain audiences.

Joan Rivers knows she has image issues. She knows she’s considered over-the-hill in the show biz world. But she also knows that she’s not done. And she knows who she is and what she’s not.

That kind of awareness, warts and all, is imminently watchable. Even when she hurts herself, she doesn’t shy away from what is.

A repetitive message can be tiring, but Joan Rivers herself is always being interesting and doing interesting things here. The filmmakers did a good job at not showing extended sections of her play, the stand-up sets, the TV specials, etc. We know her work, and these elements can feel overly self-serving. Instead, we mostly see the preparations before and the consequences after. I found this a compelling approach.

I’ve had my own fluxuating opinions of Joan Rivers over the years. But she’s always had that ability to elicit genuine, and sometimes surprised, laughs out of me. She’s aware that she doesn’t have many of the natural qualities that one would associate with entertainment successes. She knows that she’s had to work, perhaps harder than most, for what she gets. This documentary shows all that and that elicits genuine, and not really all that surprising, respect out of me.

In many ways, The Red Shoes is too simplistic for today’s audiences. A young, ambitious dancer gets her shot within the top-notch ballet company run by the uncompromising master Boris Lermontov. While on her rise, she meets a similarly talented young composer and falls in love. Love or art? Love and art. The ending is not hard to guess.

But in so many other more important ways, The Red Shoes is sophisticated beyond the capabilities of modern mass audiences. First, the movie-making is incredible. The colors and settings of the film are gorgeous to look at. It often dares to frame scenes in very interesting, yet composed, ways.

During Vicki Page (our young ballerina) and Lermontov’s first meeting, she’s practically cheek-to-cheek with a candelabra in the frame and yet… it works. The 15-minute “The Red Shoes” ballet sequence is mesmerizing. It surpasses “The American in Paris” and “Singing in the Rain” sections because, while it is artistically and technically (for what was possible at the time) worthy, it also contributes so much to the movie itself.

The ballet sequence does allow for the audience to understand the parallel structure of the movie but that’s very minor. The more important aspect is that it shows, from the dancer’s point of view, what happens within a performance. We see the dance from Vicki’s experience, not from the audience’s. For non-artists watching a movie about the artistic drive, this is important.

The second way that this movie is sophisticated is that the characters are ones we don’t see much of anymore. As a comparison, everyone in Black Swan is pretty straight forward. You know what they want. The Red Shoe’s artists may seem understandable within the context of the film, but your film club will have a ball discussing what everyone’s interpretations of the characters are.

Dancer Moira Shearer famously turned the movie down for a year before finally consenting to take on Vicki Page. She was worth the wait. It is hard for me to think of anyone else being able to pull it off. Without her, without the right Vicki, the movie wouldn’t have worked.

But it is Anton Walbrook‘s Lermontov that will stick in your mind. I have my own thoughts about the character, and, I imagine, so will you. But Walbrook plays Lermontov with fire and chill and passion and cruelty but still keeps him a mystery. Lermontov is a man that engages but does not want to be known. Walbrook brings that along, not only with the characters within the film, but with us too. Spending time with him is definitely worth your while.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list: 256

I really enjoyed the visuals. I absolutely cannot stand the Shrek/Madagascar style of fake computer design. Those rounded, blurry, computer-looking edges drive me crazy. They are something to be borne.

Rango’s characters and environments are brilliantly crisp and clear. The colors and details are so sharp that I felt like this must be in HD. The humor is more often situational rather than being stand-alone gags. Also, Rango is a defined character within a defined world. This is an element that often goes missing, and until something better comes along, it’s hard for us to even know enough to miss it.

But Rango did make me aware of this rarity by deftly setting the scenes without bulky exposition.

Our hero, Rango, is a chameleon who has spent his entire life as a pet. Then one fateful day, he is cast out into the great-wide world to face adventure and his destiny. The movie is a little muddy on its overall theme as Rango struggles with his identity. Can a sheltered house chameleon find his place in the great American desert where survival is dependent on the barest of basics?

Well I hope you know the answer is yes, but while the adventure ties up nicely, the initial question of identity is not.

Still, I don’t think most viewers of this film is going to mind it too much. Animated movies have really come a long way in recent years, but I think Rango is something even different than all that. This is a cartoon that felt serious—like they were going after a “real” movie feel. As in… animated movies are real movies.