Author: Metacrone

Lifelong film, television and theater enthusiast. Choose love.

Oscars 2018 Official Ballot- Keep Score at Home– Updating Live with the Winners

~ Metacrone

 

Oscar

5:57 PM MST Here we go! I’ll highlight the winner in each category after they’re announced!

Oscar night is here! In the US the awards are being broadcast at 8:00 EST, 5:00 PST, on ABC, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. HULU is also showing the awards live.

Indiewire and iTunes have teamed up to provide a 2018 Oscars ballot that you can use for your Oscars pool, to keep score during the ceremony, or to make your predictions before things get started.

Download a copy of the ballot, or just look over a copy, after the jump.

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Movie Review: I, Tonya

~ Metacrone

ITonyaposter

I, Tonya * 2017 * Rated R * 2 hours

😸😸😸😸½ Rated 4.5 Happy lap cats

I, Tonya is the tragicomic, mostly, sorta true story of the rise and fall of an American woman and Olympic figure skater who has it all, then loses it, due to circumstances both within and beyond her control. It tells a timeless story of love, loss, ambition, rivalry, greed, classism, misogyny and sheer stupidity. Though the stupidity is mostly on the part of the skater’s male associates, most of the negative consequences for that stupidity fall onto her. That’s the timeless part of the story, as blaming the woman for everyone else’s mistakes is a cultural tradition that goes all the way back to the bible.

Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) was four years old when her mother, LaVona (Alison Janney) hired her first skating coach, Diane Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson), and began pressuring her to excel at the sport. Her mother verbally and physically abused her throughout her childhood and forced her to focus on figure skating as the most important aspect of her life, more important, even, than her education. Tonya spent most of her time training, despite how difficult the family’s poverty made it for them to continue to afford her skating career.

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Movie Review: The Shape of Water

~ Metacrone ~ 2 Comments

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The Shape of Water * 2017 * Rated R * 2 Hours 3 Minutes

😸😸😸😸😸 Rated 5/5 Happy lap cats

The Shape of Water is a dreamy fairy tale directed by Guillermo del Toro, who also wrote the screen play, along with Vanessa Taylor. It’s more Grimms’ Brothers than Disney, but has additional layers of Cold War era tropes that are deconstructed over the course of the film, so that by the end of the story many truths are revealed

The Shape of Water takes place in Baltimore, in the year 1962, the height of Cold War paranoia and espionage. Eliza Esposito (Sally Hawkins) is a mute maid who uses sign language to speak and works as a custodian in a government research facility. Despite her disability (she’s been mute since birth and has a series of scars on her neck), lack of family (she was found abandoned by a river as an infant), and lack of wealth, she has a rich imagination and a few good friends. Her best friends are her chatty coworker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and her starving artist neighbor, Giles (Richard Jenkins).

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Movie Review: The Post

~ Metacrone ~ 2 Comments

the-post

The Post * 2017 * Rated PG-13 * 1 Hour 56 Minutes

😸😸😸😸😸 Rated 5/5 Happy lap cats

I was a kid when the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers were big news, and in junior high school when the Watergate scandal seemed to go on forever. As an adult, I understand the importance of these events, but, as they were happening, they bored me to tears. At a time when our entertainment options were limited, the struggles of the Nixon administration took over the airwaves for years.

So I don’t seek out movies like The Post. However, silly me, I married a political junkie, and Mr Metawitches loves a political thriller or a political history film. This review will be heavy on his insight, since this is his genre. Given all of that, it’s impressive that The Post kept me engrossed for the entire movie, with its perfectly timed pacing, snappy dialogue, and enough intrigue to turn the story into a political thriller.

The Post, directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, follows the story of the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 by The NY Times and The Washington Post. The Pentagon Papers, top secret documents which exposed the futile nature of the US involvement in the Vietnam War, and the lies that were told over the course of various presidential administrations to cover this up, had been leaked to both newspapers by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study and had access to the finished product.

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Movie Review: Darkest Hour

~ Metacrone

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Darkest Hour * 2017 * Rated PG-13 * 2 Hours 5 Minutes

😸😸😸😸🌑 Rated 4/5 happy lap cats

If there’s one thing I’ve learned this Oscars season, it’s that the current generation of filmmakers are certain that the past was sepia-toned and covered with a misty film of dust, which sometimes added a soft glow, and sometimes thickened to dirt or mud. Darkest Hour, directed by Joe Wright and written by Anthony McCarten, is the dustiest and crustiest of the films which follow this trend. It’s very entertaining, but it’s steeped in its own sense of importance.

This biographical film tells the story of Winston Churchill’s (Gary Oldman) first few weeks as Prime Minister of Britain, after Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) has been forced to resign in 1940 because of his preference for appeasement of the Nazis. Churchill is invited by King George VI, known to those closest to him as Bertie (Ben Mendelsohn), to become the next Prime Minister. He accepts, and begins an awkward, strained relationship with the King and virtually everyone else in the British government.

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Travelers Renewed for Season 3 by Netflix Exclusively [Updated 3/15/18]

~ Metacrone

Travelers

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Movie Review: Call Me by Your Name

~ Metacrone

CallMeByYourName

Call Me by Your Name * 2017 * Rated R * 2 hours 11 Minutes

😸😸😸😸½  Rated 4½/5 Happy lap cats

Call Me By Your Name, directed by Luca Guadagnino and with a screenplay by James Ivory, is a beautiful movie in many ways. The film, which is adapted from André Aciman’s novel, is a character study and coming of age story that follows a 17 year old boy as he explores his sexuality and falls in love with his father’s summer graduate assistant, a 24 year old man. It takes place in 1983 in a small town Northern Italy, which is so lovely it seems almost idyllic, except that the couple have to keep their relationship a secret and can’t even kiss in front of others.

Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and his family spend summers and holidays on the estate that his mother inherited, in the town of Crema. The region embodies every gorgeous thing you’ve ever heard about Italy. The film is brimming with old stone work, old tile work, newly discovered ancient statuary, turquoise waters, orchards dripping with fruit, golden sunshine, and patios with tables overflowing with delicious fresh food and wine. Even the rainy days are perfectly enticing times to sit by the antique fireplace and listen to Elio’s mom, Annella (Amira Casar), translate medieval romance novels.

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Movie Review: Lady Bird

~ Metacrone

lady bird poster

Lady Bird * 2017 * Rated R * 93 Minutes

😸😸😸😸😸 Rated 5/5 Happy lap cats

Lady Bird, the semi-autobiographical coming of age story written and directed by Greta Gerwig, is a perfectly constructed film that does exactly what it sets out to do, and does it beautifully. It’s a counterpart to the many, many thoughtful male coming of age stories that have been filmed over the years. The most recent one that comes to mind is Richard Linklater’s acclaimed 2014 film Boyhood.

Except Boyhood was so long and dragged so much that I don’t think I even finished watching it, while Lady Bird is a brief 93 minutes that’s evenly paced, charming and has no padding. Lady Bird follows Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson through her senior year in high school, as she navigates life in a liberalish Catholic high school; tries on various identities and friendship cliques; dreams about life in a more exciting, glamorous place than her hometown of Sacramento, California; and tests the waters of sex and romance.

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Altered Carbon Season 1 Episode 9: Rage in Heaven Recap

~ Metacrone

AC109Rei

Episode 9 is a dark episode, arguably the darkest of the season. But we also hear the real solution to Bancroft’s mystery from the person who orchestrated his evening, so at least there’s closure amidst the real death, betrayal, and disturbing fetishes.

The episode begins with another brief fast forward, this time with two hands playing Rock, Paper, Scissors.

In the present time, Tak sits at Poe’s bar while Poe examine’s Tak’s pardon. Poe pronounces the pardon exceptionally thorough, which is a welcome surprise. Tak says he knows what really happened to Bancroft, but Poe doesn’t take the bait.

Poe’s feeling a little pissy about Tak putting the entire gang in danger and making Poe kill a fellow AI, in order to give Laurens a solution that was a lie. Tak notes that the dead AI was no great loss, and he wanted to turn Lizzie into a sex slave. Poe comments that no one is ever going to hurt his little girl again.

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Altered Carbon Season 1 Episode 8: Clash by Night Recap

~ Metacrone
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The elusive pardon.

Tak’s voiceover: “What we believe shapes who we are. Belief can bring us salvation or destruction. But when you believe a lie for too long, the truth doesn’t set you free. It tears you apart.”

This episode picks up where episode 7 left off. Tak is reeling from the discovery of what his sister has turned into, or possibly always was. He can’t take in the fact that Rei is confessing to killing Quell, the love of his life, and the rest of the Uprising rebels, who had become the family he never had. Even worse, he can’t accept that it was premeditated murder, done in cold blood with no remorse.

Tak: Quell and the Envoys were our family. How could you kill our family?

Rei: They were just soldiers. You and I, we’re family. Our lives will be better now.

Tak: When everyone I ever loved was taken away from me? Do you know what that did to me? What I became?

Rei: I tried to find you.

Tak: How hard did you look?

Rei: And then you got yourself caught by CTAC. They locked you up so tight no one could get to you.

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