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Post by MagdaFR on Jul 17, 2020 16:46:12 GMT
Well, you can vote in all categories. BC is in the list for The Imitation Game. |
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Post by mllemass on Jul 17, 2020 17:45:05 GMT
I didn’t see anywhere to vote, but I started listening to the podcast about the movie, and I don’t see the point of any of it. There are a group of people sitting around making fun of the movie - literally laughing about it - saying that it got lots of hype in 2014, but it’s actually a bad movie. And there’s the old complaint that it should have been a completely different movie focussing on his sexual preference. I couldn’t listen to any more and turned it off. They gave it 5/10.
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Post by sgev1977 on Jul 17, 2020 18:23:05 GMT
They are award pundits so just ignore them! People obsessed with awards a) doesn't really care or know about films; b) even when they are ignorant they are pretentious as hell because they think obsessively talking about Oscars is a way of showing their "good taste"!
The movie isn't a masterwork and yes, it's pretty conventional but that's why it was and still is very popular. That's the real value of the film! A lot of people knew about Alan Turing thanks to the film. Every year during Turing's anniversary people on social media recommend it. That's actually nice. It's a very accessible movie with great performances that a lot of people watched (no one never talks about how huge it was in the box office) and still love.
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Post by mllemass on Jul 17, 2020 21:58:25 GMT
The only other nominated movie from 2014 that I saw was Birdman, which I didn’t like at all - and it won. I eventually watched Gone Girl. I thought it was ridiculous, and I can’t believe that it was even in the same category as The Imitation Game.
I actually watched TIG again just the other day, when it was on tv. To me, it still holds up. It’s just as good and just as thrilling as it was when I first saw it at TIFF.
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Post by sgev1977 on Jul 17, 2020 23:49:36 GMT
I really love David Fincher. I seriously think he is one of the best filmmakers working these days but I haven't watched Gone Girl!!! It's kind of unforgivable because it's on Latin America Netflix!
I don't like Gonzalez Iñarritu, tho.! Also unforgivable because he's a compatriot! I watched his breakthrough film, Amores Perros like 100th times because I used it and other contemporary Mexican films for my bachelor thesis and I though it was very superficial and classist movie. I'm always amazed how his low classes characters are always amoral and untrustworthy meanwhile there is a fake criticism of high class people but they are the thinking ones and the ones who grew up and survive. And there is the rich guy whose penitence is to see how his trophy girlfriend's legs are disfigured by the accident. Why the woman is always the one who should be castigated by the man's faults?
Then it's Babel! The Mexican maid is an idiot who lost two little kids in the desert just because she wanted to go to a party!!! That's horrible! And supposedly it was a denouement about poor Mexican immigrants being discriminated in the USA but that portrait was awful! She almost kills two little kids!!! And the Japanese girl was a nympho and the Arab kids incestuous perverts who almost kill the mother of the kids that the Mexican woman also almost kill! Seriously it could be a white supremacist ad about how poor foreigners are extremely dangerous for rich white Americans! I remember at the time, they said Cate Blanchett was playing a racist woman but the worst thing she does is to ask for a closed bottle of water when she is outside of her country! Apparently that's racism so she is castigated by the plot receiving a bullet in the head or most exactly his poor husband is castigated because she is only a narrative tool aka a female character in the male's character story!
I think he is technically brilliant but also extremely shallow and he clearly doesn't like poor people! So no, I haven't watched Birdman neither!
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Post by roverpup on Jul 18, 2020 4:18:11 GMT
I saw Selma, Foxcatcher, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wild, Whiplash, The Imitation Game, Nightcrawler, Interstellar, Gone Girl and Birdman.
With the exception of Interstellar they were all very entertaining movies to me (for very different reasons). Interstellar wasn't a bad movie but it wasn't in the same class as the others IMO.
Never saw Boyhood for some reason but I would watch it if it came around again. Ida sounds like a very interesting film so I wouldn't mind seeing that one too.
Inherent Vice - I saw the previews for it and it didn't appeal to me in any way so I took a pass on that one.
American Sniper - Dan saw it while I watched the Imitation Game for the 3 time and told me it wasn't a very good movie. Said it was very predictable and poorly edited.
I didn't mind Birdman winning (of course I would have preferred The Imitation Game and BC to have won). Birdman was a quality production. I only felt really strongly though about American Sniper NOT winning!
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Post by mllemass on Jul 18, 2020 6:45:05 GMT
You know how sometimes you watch a movie and it leaves no impression on you? That was Birdman for me. It was completely forgettable. It wasn’t necessarily a bad impression, but it wasn’t “wow, this movie deserves an Oscar!”
I know I’ve mentioned this before - after TIG came out on video, one of my co-workers came in one morning all excited about an amazing movie she’d watched the night before. It was about this WWII codebreaker - and then she turned to me and said “Oh! It had that actor that you like!”. I was stunned because I had talked about nothing else for weeks when the movie came out - trying to get tickets to TIFF, seeing the movie, getting Benedict’s autograph. I had brought the photos and autograph to work to show everyone, and repeated the story of my adventure a million times. After all that, it turned out that my poor co-workers has just politely tuned me out when whenever I went on and on obsessively about Benedict.
My point, though, is that my co-worker thought the movie was amazing. And she was being completely objective and had not been influenced by my opinion (no matter how hard I had tried!)
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Post by Hannah Lee on Jul 18, 2020 11:42:37 GMT
It's an interesting thing to focus on a particular year in film, one that wasn't that long ago, and try to remember, recreate what it was like at the time and the impression those films had at the time. I haven't seen any of them in years, though I would like to go back and re-watch TIG. It's always fascinating too to see people's different impressions of films, for example, with Birdman, I remember really being impressed by it, and moved by it and I was OK with it winning Best Picture, though, years later, I can't really remember much about it or the specifics of why I thought it was so good ... so maybe you're on to something mllemass, about the 'forgettable' aspect of it.
The Grand Budapest Hotel was one I really enjoyed, and thought it did what it set out to do extremely well. It was absolutely a Wes Anderson film in every way. I was thrilled when it won Best Original Score; it's one of the first films where I actually rewatched scenes specifically because the music was perfect and elevated / fit the scene in a way I'd never seen before in a film.
A few of the leading films I never saw for various reasons, whether it was the subject matter or lead performer that I just am not drawn to (American Sniper, Nightcrawler, Inherent Vice) and Foxcatcher I started to watch, but Carell's prosthetics/performance brought back memories of a family member/coach I'd known when I was young who was not a good person, so I turned it off (I may revisit at some point). Whiplash was a wild ride and I was so glad JK Simmons won for his performance. I really do think BC should have won for lead over ER, on the strength of their performances, though maybe that's a bit of the fangirl talking, particularly because BC's portrayal of Hawking years before was SOOO good.
The one film that I really remember well was Boyhood ... I absolutely detested it. While I admired the ambition and approach of filming with the same cast over years and years, it strangely felt really really lazy and self-indulgent. The lead character/actor (the boy) was really not compelling or interesting to me, the actor's performance skills got weaker as he aged, and if the character's aimlessness and lack of energy or personality was a key part of the director's theme, Linklater failed to depict that in an interesting way. For presentation, exploration of character over time and entertainment, I find the 7 Up documentary series was much better crafted.
And as far as critics discussing TIG and how it should have focused more on Turing's sexuality and sex life, I agree with the late Roger Ebert - when reviewing films, critics should focus on evaluating the film based on what it was trying to be, they kind of film it was aiming to be, not their wishes that the film would be a completely different genre and focus on different themes.
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Post by roverpup on Jul 18, 2020 12:59:50 GMT
The Theory of Everything - talk about being a forgettable movie! Birdman was 10X more memorable than TTOE!! I wanted to really like that film because I am interested in the struggle of Stephen Hawking (even before I saw BC in "Hawking"). But that film just sat there like a lump and left me totally unsatisfied in the end. It gave me no insight into the essence of what made Hawking at all.
Strange, when thinking about all the top line movies for that year I didn't remember at all about TTOE. In fact I even briefly thought "Who was BC in competition with that year for best actor?" and drew a complete blank!
BTW: LOVE your comment Hannah Lee -
"And as far as critics discussing TIG and how it should have focused more on Turing's sexuality and sex life, I agree with the late Roger Ebert - when reviewing films, critics should focus on evaluating the film based on what it was trying to be, the kind of film it was aiming to be, not their wishes that the film would be a completely different genre and focus on different themes."
👍👍👍
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