…for the nominees for the WGA Awards. I was nominated once…
Original Screenplay:
Black Snake Moan
Juno
Ratatouille
The Savages
Waitress
Adapted Screenplay:
3:10 to Yuma
Into the Wild
No Country for Old Men
Rescue Dawn
Zodiac
Taking a break from book reviewing to bring some reflection and contemplation to Reading is my Superpower. I don’t generally blog about personal stuff, but the baby is still asleep and I’m showered and enjoying coffee and feel like blogging.
I rang in the New Year on the couch with Superfast Husband and Bean watching the ball drop on New York 1. I have never gone to Times Square for New Year’s Eve and never will. Big crowds just aren’t my scene, and these days, neither are big parties. The most rockingest New Years I ever had was the turn of the millennium, which I spent club hopping on South Beach in Miami with an ex-boyfriend who turned out to be a nice guy but an absolutely atrocious boyfriend. But we did have a fabulous time that night.
My resolutions for 2008:
And now, my favorite movies of 2007. Thanks to awards season screeners, I’m pretty well caught up, though haven’t yet watched PT Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. The links are to reviews I wrote for my old job.
Best of 2007:
Honorable mention: Grindhouse, The Savages, 3:10 to Yuma, This is England, Jindabyne, Longford
Worst: Sunshine, Stephanie Daley, Ghost Rider, Hannibal Rising
Favorites from Sundance 2007 that haven’t made it to theaters yet: Son of Rambow, Teeth
Happy New Year, everyone! Here’s to nothing but page-turners filled with perfect prose in 2008!
Two mini-obsessions of mine documented in one video:
HT: Jim Emerson
And by the way, I’ve totally mastered reading while breastfeeding. Blogging is another thing altogether–long posts have to wait for naptime, because I have limited patoence with typing one-handed.
I have a year-end wrap up at House Next Door.
A little bit o’ You Tube to start off your week:
And Happy Veteran’s Day to all of our brave servicemen and women. Thank you.
You may be aware that members of the Writers Guild of America are on strike, sending late night talk shows into reruns and threatening the remainder of the television season. I am one of them.
You may have no idea why. Here’s a short video that explains what’s at stake:
Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a movie buff as well as a Superfast Reader. So, in honor of today’s work read, I’m posting an entry in the Close-Up Blogathon, hosted by my friends over at The House Next Door. Matt Seitz has already posted a fabulous article on one of the final images in Raising Arizona. I’m also dedicating this post to the closing images in Into the Wild–a man’s face intercut with a man’s memories, confession, repentance, and salvation all on a face beyond words. (I was bawling like a baby. See this movie.)
The title of this post, “Too Many Notes,” comes from a standout scene in Milos Forman’s Amadeus. The emperor tells Mozart that his opera has too many notes. Mozart asks the emperor which His Majesty would have removed. Ha! This small scene reminds me of Kristin Thompson‘s seminal essay “The Concept of Cinematic Excess” found in the anthology Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. Simply put, excess refers to images that bleed out from the screen, refusing to be contained by the superficial meanings found in the text of the film. Sometimes excess yields subtext; other times, excess offers a critique. The musical, being the most performance-dependent of all film genres, gives us excess at every turn. And it’s this excess that reminds us what movies do that books cannot.
So, in celebration of the power of the image, I’m offering up four of my favorite examples of cinematic excess in the musical. I didn’t adhere to the rules of the blog-a-thon exactly, because these aren’t close-ups of faces, but each is a moment that highlights performance, and the actor’s body, above all else.
Pictures & videos after the jump. Continue reading
No, not books TO movies, books IN movies, used as props or set dressing. Whenever I see a character reading, I want to know what they’re reading. All too often you can’t tell, but when you can, it’s usually informative.
The AMC series “Mad Men” has had some fun book cameos. Set in the 1960s New York City advertising world, the show consciously references books and films of the time. I noticed in the first episode that the main office set appeared to be an imitation of the office in the film version of Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything (with lighting and camera angles borrowed from The Apartment). Somewhere around episode 4 or 5, one of the characters is shown reading Jaffe’s book–which, of course, would be true to the time period. Continue reading
I recently participated in a project hosted by Eddie on Film, who I know from my old job as a film reviewer/blogger. He wanted to come up with a democratically chosen list of the best non-English language films, and sought nominations from a group of online and offline critics. I was one of them (thanks, Eddie!). Continue reading
