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)

Spoilers below:
Since I was expecting an action novel, the ploddingly slow start was confusing. The prose is not unpleasant, and the details are interesting, but there is a lot of explaining and talking without anything much happening. This goes on for more than half the book.

When I finally realized that I was going to be reading a murder mystery and a financial mystery, I pretty much knew right away what the resolutions were going to be. The set up for both story lines are pretty obvious. No, I was not prepared for the exact specifics and how disturbing the crime portion turned out to be, but those plot revelations always had to be told to us. They were not ones that we, the readers, could have figured out on our own. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is that kind of mystery.

Overall, the book was readable and fairly entertaining. I did read late into the night because I wanted to find out what happened. But I do have trouble with the questionable pacing and the lack of depth within the main characters.

I know that this was a first effort, and that Larsson died before the manuscripts ever reached an editor’s eye, but for me, it would have been a pick-up-and-put-down novel. I’m still not sure why it has just caught fire around the world. Thanks to the reputation of the series, however, I will have to give the second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, a try.

This post is two months late. Ask Aunt Susan played in November as a part of the Goodman’s New Stages Amplified series, which is such an interesting idea. Three playwrights were given the opportunity to workshop brand new plays in front of live audiences. Essentially, I would be watching a work in progress, and I would just happen to catch this one on the last day of its run.

With that in mind, I must nevertheless recommend to Seth Bockley that he really has to buckle down and do some additional work on this piece if he wants to make it live.

If I remember correctly, the play was 90 minutes with no intermission, a requirement of the workshop. The play that I saw was not a 90-minute play.

The plot set up is pretty straight forward. A young computer guy gets roped into writing content for an online advice site as “Aunt Susan.” His troubles multiply as this fictional character explodes in popularity.

The play starts off really well with a good establishment of character and the promise of some lively dialogue. Here, we are grounded in a pretty realistic world. As the play progresses though, it morphs more and more into techno-noir.

I have no idea if “techno-noir” is a thing or not but I must confess that I didn’t pick up that this was a noir work until the post-show discussion.

Noir is a lot about atmosphere and feeling, sometimes at the expense of a logical plot. Noir hides characters’ motivations and invites sinister undertones. If the audience (me) is not aware of this noir intention, a disconnect and dislike can really come quickly.

Independent of this, I felt that there were too many other competing trends and themes to go along side. Are we going to talk about identity, alienation, cyber-morality, the validity of relationships online, and capitalistic greed?

The play either needs to be expanded in length to better develop what needs to be developed or have its content edited to be more comfortable in its 90-minute skin. The characters were either too many or not-developed enough. The main character’s breakdown either needs to be more realistic or more crazy. The play felt trapped in between both ends of what it could be. To be entirely honest though, I’m not sure it could be saved into something beyond merely ok.

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

I had almost forgotten what musical theater used to be like. I’ve gotten so used to the more modern productions fielding massive sets that move and flash and smoke. Everyone’s in complicated costumes and complicated make-up.

This traveling production of Fiddler brought in just a few well-made pieces to establish place, and then it let the actors carry the stage. A very nice change of pace. I was very aware that I was watching a stage performance, if that makes sense at all.

Overall, I think this company does a passable job, but I do have some qualms to share.

My first note has to do with the number of people on stage in relation to the size of the stage. I can’t imagine that the Auditorium’s stage is really that much smaller than other stages around the country, but for whatever reason, the crowd scenes felt overly crowded. This muddles the action and makes things harder to follow.

A jammed stage also hems in Jerome Robbins’s original choreography. I would have loved to see the dancers highlighted in those now iconic set pieces. I imagine that this is a constant challenge for every traveling show, but it seems like they should have a system figured out by now.

I also didn’t think that the featured dancers were all that strong, but this could be due to the constrained square footage with which they had to work.

Unfortunately, I also felt that some of the casting could have been better. The rabbi, for one, did not have a voice that fit the character. The constable, while large, did not project the presence that he should have to make the role work.

If this production is going to rely on the talent, the producers need to find the right people for the parts. As it is, I feel like I saw an enjoyable effort but not a top-notch one.