Oscar Update

I’m doing horribly on the reviewing movies thing. I even managed to lose the list I was keeping of movies I had yet to add to my RT journal so now those are gone forever because I can’t remember what was on the list. *sigh*

In any case, I figured I’d do an update on the Oscar Movie Challenge:

Apocolypto (not going to see)
Babel
Black Dahlia, The
Blood Diamond
Borat
Cars
Children of Men
Click
Curse of the Golden Flower
Departed, The
Devil Wears Prada, The
Dreamgirls
Flags of Our Fathers
Good German, The
Good Shepard, The
Half Nelson
Happy Feet
Illusionist, The
Last King of Scotland, The
Letters from Iwo Jima
Little Children
Little Miss Sunshine
Marie Antoinette
Monster House
Notes on a Scandal
Pan's Labyrinth
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Poseidon
Prestige, The
Pursuit of Happyness, The
Queen, The
Superman Returns
United 93 (not going to see)
Venus
Volver

So I’m about half done. I’d be doing a lot better if Adam hadn’t added all the Harry Potter movies to our Blockbuster Total Access queue and moved them up to the top. Oh well. The remaining movies seem to be a good mix of films I’d probably see anyway (like The Queen, Little Children, Venus) and films I’d probably consciously avoid seeing (like Blood Diamond, Letters from Iwo Jima, The Good German.)

I’m happy to report that there haven’t been many so far that I really didn’t like. My only real complaint could be that I found Half Nelson and Flags of our Fathers to be incredibly slow-moving and boring (but not so unwatchable that I actually had to stop watching them a la Cinderella Man.) My favorite so far is hard to choose. Little Miss Sunshine was a great movie but in a completely different category than The Prestige, which was also a great movie. I don’t think I’d be able to narrow it down to one, but both of those have been my favorites overall.

The last movie I watched was Babel. I had no idea what it was about – only that Brad Pitt was in it. I thought maybe it was a period piece about the Tower of Babel. Uhm, no. Not even close. It’s a Traffic-esque film about how lives intersect each other. A good 2/3 of the film wasn’t even in English so perhaps that’s where the Babel thing comes in. Oh wait, I just looked at IMDB and apparently “In Gen. 11:9, the name of Babel is etymologized by association with the Hebrew verb balal, 'to confuse or confound.'" "Babel", through a series of misunderstandings, interweaves the unfortunate circumstances of a Moroccan, an American, a Mexican and a Japanese family.” So there you go. It was generally just too long and I’m still confused by the leaps forward and backward in time between the different stories. Anyway, one more down.