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Articles tagged with: Oscars 2012 Death Race

21/31: Albert Nobbs
December 21, 2011 – 8:07 PM | 7 Comments
21/31: <I>Albert Nobbs</I>

Albert Nobbs has two big secrets. One is that he’s socking away money, farthing by painstaking farthing, under a floorboard in the servant’s quarters, at the hotel where he works as a butler.
The other, and …

20/31: The Artist
December 21, 2011 – 12:33 AM | 6 Comments
20/31: <I>The Artist</I>

My esteemed colleague Couch Baron, blowing off The Artist with the combined force and economy of that air-puff glaucoma test you get at the eye doctor, described the film as, among other things, “so up …

19/31: Coriolanus
December 20, 2011 – 6:24 PM | 4 Comments
19/31: <I>Coriolanus</I>

Adaptations of Shakespeare: not for me. In fact, Shakespeare’s plays, page or stage: not for me. Shakespeare’s verse is a different story, and yes, I know he wrote the plays in verse, and yes, I…know. …

15/31: Rampart
December 15, 2011 – 12:21 PM | 6 Comments
15/31: <I>Rampart</I>

The title of the film refers to the LAPD Rampart scandal of the late ’90s, but the story follows a single cop, Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson), who’s trying to hold everything together by any means …

13/31: The Help
December 13, 2011 – 9:12 PM | 10 Comments
13/31: <I>The Help</I>

I give The Help sooo much credit; it won me over despite my utter determination to hate it. You can ask Couch Baron, to whom I spent a good ten minutes bitching on IM about …

12/31: Martha Marcy May Marlene
December 12, 2011 – 4:39 PM | 7 Comments
12/31: <I>Martha Marcy May Marlene</I>

I didn’t realize how tense I had gotten, physically, while watching Martha Marcy May Marlene until that last black screen. What an outstanding slow build of “can’t look”/”can’t look away” — you’d think the inciting …

11/31: J. Edgar
December 11, 2011 – 4:22 PM | 15 Comments
11/31: <em>J. Edgar</em>

I have no idea what the movie is trying to do. I only know that it fails on almost every level save the acting, and even that isn’t great; it’s merely not as disastrous as …

10/31: Shame
December 10, 2011 – 8:46 PM | 9 Comments
10/31: <em>Shame</em>

The specific buzz around Shame, and Michael Fassbender’s performance, did not fill me with anticipation. Sometimes, when a performance is repeatedly called brave or groundbreaking, the distinction between the bravery or originality of the performance …

9/31: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
December 9, 2011 – 2:13 PM | 22 Comments
9/31: <I>Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy</I>

It has all the tools for a great movie: a good old-fashioned ’70s-Cold-War-paranoia plot; a roster of fantastic actors and Hey, It’s That Guys, including Colin Firth, Ciaran Hinds, John Hurt, and the dude who …

8/31: Beginners
December 8, 2011 – 3:24 PM | 5 Comments
8/31: <I>Beginners</I>

Watching a lot of movies in a row can scramble the brain, but it can also let those movies reflect on and inform one another. For example, the Oscars Death Race is a time of …