Best Picture nominees:
"American Hustle"
"Gravity"
"Captain Phillips"
"Dallas Buyers Club"
"Philomena"
"The Wolf of Wall Street"
Glad to see Nebraska getting its share of the endless Oscar love for all things Alexander Payne.
My strong suit as a reviewer, however, is not telling you that good movies are good or bad movies are bad, but finding the ones that aren't quite what they seem to be.
For example, 12 Years a Slave could have been a very good movie by just adding one twist at the end. Remember how the guy comes home at the end from being kidnapped and apologizes to his family? It's a puzzling scene: why is he apologizing? Lots of deep explanations have been offered, but my guess is that the director had him apologize because the first 20 minutes of the movie were as phony as they looked: the weight of historical evidence suggests that Solomon Northup enslavement had started out with him as part of a con man ring playing the old skin game and something went wrong. What a kick in the gut to modern audiences it would have been with an ending in which Northup apologizes to his wife for trying to pull another con and getting caught. But, that would have been too disturbing and interesting for contemporary critics.
My strong suit as a reviewer, however, is not telling you that good movies are good or bad movies are bad, but finding the ones that aren't quite what they seem to be.
For example, 12 Years a Slave could have been a very good movie by just adding one twist at the end. Remember how the guy comes home at the end from being kidnapped and apologizes to his family? It's a puzzling scene: why is he apologizing? Lots of deep explanations have been offered, but my guess is that the director had him apologize because the first 20 minutes of the movie were as phony as they looked: the weight of historical evidence suggests that Solomon Northup enslavement had started out with him as part of a con man ring playing the old skin game and something went wrong. What a kick in the gut to modern audiences it would have been with an ending in which Northup apologizes to his wife for trying to pull another con and getting caught. But, that would have been too disturbing and interesting for contemporary critics.
From what I've seen so far, I would probably vote for American Hustle. It's a thoroughly entertaining movie that seems like a respectable Interim Placeholder Best Picture until enough time has passed for us to actually figure out what really was the best movie.
Gravity would be fine, too: my main complaint is that at 91 minutes it's too short, and thus stints on motivation, character development, and some explanations for the audience of Newton's Three Laws of Motion. The missing first act almost writes itself. But to say that you wish the movie were longer is not exactly a devastating criticism, whereas seemingly almost nobody would mind an Editor's Cut of Wolf of Wall Street.