Rambling Film

Reviewing all of the Oscar nominated shorts has become one of the things I look forward to the most after the nominations are announced. This is the quickest I've ever found all of the shorts to watch before the ceremony. The majority of these shorts are available to watch online. Below are my quick reviews Best Animated Short The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse - Platitudes: The Movie. C+ The Flying Sailor - Based on the true story of a man in Halifax who was blown 2 kilometers back during an explosion and lived to tell about it. Of the shorts lists, this was not the one I expected to see animated dick in. It's amusing and used several different styles of animation in it's quick 7 minute run time. Respect. B Ice Merchants - I LOVE this short. It's so perfect. Lovely hand drawn animation, clever story, a perfect combination of sweet and sad. A+ My Year of Dicks - Oh god, the awkwardness of being a teenage girl that I wish I could forget. I laughed, I cringed, I...

I haven't had a lot of time to get to the theater lately, but I'm still watching movies. This past week was very family focused at my house, so here are a few quick reviews. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent - Not a family movie, but truly the catalyst to what started our movie marathon thanks to several Paddington 2 jokes in this film. I thought it was fun. Pedro Pascal might even outshine Nicolas Cage in this. He was great. B Paddington - As tempting as it would be to jump right into the much loved sequel, we had to see the first one. I thought this was so sweet. Every time I was going to write it off as being just "fine" it made me laugh out loud. I couldn't ask for more. B Paddington 2 - The hype around this movie is impossible. It was never going to live up to Godfather-like expectations but I still really enjoyed it! I loved the pop up book animation sequence, I loved that they brought back the hard stare, and I love that Hugh Grant was doing the abs...

This post is made with the help of my Twitter buddy, Paul  and the r/oscarsdeathrace subreddit. Like the year before, we helped each other locate all of the Oscar nominated shorts online, and this year I was lucky enough to go 15/15 again! (click the "shorts" tag to see my previous posts) This year, there's a pretty clear winner for me in each category. We'll see if the Academy sees it that way too. Below are a few quick thoughts on each short. Live Action Short Film Ala Kacchu – Take and Run - This is absolute nightmare fuel and it's horrifying to know this actually happens thousands of times a year. I'm grateful for the direction this film went, because if it had gone another, I think I would've lost my mind. A- The Dress - BIG yikes. This short is needlessly cruel. All of the live action shorts this year are depressing, and frankly misery is kind of this category's forte, but this really sets you up like it's going to be a life changing moment ...

Every now and then I’m fortunate enough to review a fellow movie bloggers’ work. I’ve done so in the past with Alex and Ruth . Now Chris ’ collection of shorts is getting a new re-release on DVD !  What I liked the most about this collection is seeing how Chris has progressed as a filmmaker. The earliest short was filmed in 2012, with the newest being in 2018. They're not connected in one linear story. And because there's such a stark difference in content, I didn't want to give them specific letter grades. Instead, here are my quick reviews of each one.  Kip - This revenge tale comes from Chris' comic series Velcro: The Ninja Cat . I can appreciate the creepy masks used in this one. It's very short and to the point and left me interested in what could come next.  The Red Scarf - This anime-inspired short is about a young girl who keeps dreaming of a man in a red scarf who tries to hurt her. She's desperate to understand these dreams. I liked the story here. I...

Like I did in 2019 and 2020 , I tried my best to locate all the Oscar nominated Short films to give them quick reviews. This year I was fortunate enough to find all 15! Much thanks to the random users of R/OscarsDeathRace who helped me with two films that took me *forever* to find online to stream. If you saw my predictions posts, you already know who I think is going to win, but check out my quick thoughts below. Best Documentary Short Subject Colette - About a 90 year old former French Resistance fighter who makes the decision to go to Germany after all this time to visit the concentration camp her brother was murdered in. I liked how frank Colette was, and how she talked about morbid tourism with these camps. The first time I went to Germany, it was for school and we toured a camp. I've never felt so awful in my life being in a place where so many innocent lives were taken. It was like a dark cloud hanging over me. Colette talks about a fair amount of people being braver than ...

When I watch a movie I usually try to write something about it within the next day or two. But with the rise of Letterboxd, I find himself leaving a few quick thoughts there and moving on. I actually did plan on writing a few things about the following films below, but they slipped my mind. So here's a few quick thoughts. The White Tiger - This Netflix movie has been slowly gaining some awards momentum so I decided to check it out. It gets off to a really good start. It's very energetic and I enjoyed the narration, then it just fizzles out. While it says something interesting about the class divide in India, I just got bored with it. I felt it was all over the place. C The Climb - This film starts off with a long one take tracking shot of two friends riding bike and it's wonderful to look at. There's a lot of clever shots in this. It can at times feel like the directors are showing off, but I really enjoyed this story of two men and their friendship. It was sharp, fun...

I was in a documentary mood last week and every free moment I got went towards that. I have a few other posts, my monthly Rambling TV and another I'm doing specifically about things I've streamed on Hulu that will have more docs in them, but these are three that don't fit in either of those categories. Showbiz Kids - HBO's newest offering from Alex Winter. I thought this was fascinating, yet lacking. There were a variety of emotions from the actors. One of my favorite actresses, Evan Rachel Wood was very matter of fact about her long career and what she loved about it and the harsh reality it can become. (Though now I *really* need to find out which pedophile won a Golden Globe in 2017...that comment was striking) Mara Wilson was another striking speaker. I had read her book a few years ago so I knew a lot of her stories but I think she's just an interesting person, it was nice to hear from her again. Wil Wheaton comes off as very bitter about his time as a child a...

Every year when the Independent Spirit Awards are announced I make it a point to drop as many of the nominees as I can into both of my Netflix queues to see what I've missed. Lucky for me, there were a few nominees readily available for me to check out. Here are a few quick reviews. A couple of these are not Spirit Award nominees, but they were in the current conversation so I put them here too. I meant to have this post up before the actual Spirit Awards aired, but time got away from me.  The Mustang  Nominations: Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best First Feature Matthias Schoenaerts was indeed very good and a wild Jason Mitchell appeared for a few minutes which was a nice surprise, but I found this to be unbearably boring. I just can't do horse movies. I felt similar to Lean on Pete last year. Something about horses just puts me to sleep. C- Atlantics Nominations: None While this one technically didn't get any Spirit nominations, I added it to my que...

Last year I found almost all of the Oscar nominated short films to watch before the ceremony. As my local theater isn't participating in the Oscar Short showcase this year, I decided to hunt around the internet and see what I could find. Here are my quick thoughts. I was able to watch 14 of the 15 shorts. Documentary Shorts In the Absence - This doc is about the sinking of Sewol, a ferry in South Korea and the inept response by the Government when distress calls were made. Because of the poor handling, 304 people died. 250 of which were children. This was very harrowing for its brisk pace. They had phone recordings, showed news and cell phone footage and interviewed parents, survivors, and the brave civilian divers who assisted with the recovery. They covered a lot of ground in 28 minutes. A Learning to Skateboard in a War Zone If You’re a Girl - Because AETV.com forces you to watch ads (and they stop playing if you click out of the tab so you HAVE to watch them) this ...

These last few months have been....something. Thankfully, Netflix has been there for me on both the streaming and DVD side. Deep Red - For someone who counts Suspiria as one of their all time favorite movies, I haven't seen any other Dario Argento movie. I decided to fix that starting with Deep Red. I really liked it. I liked the aesthetic and enjoyed the "whodunit" part of the mystery, even if the killer ended up being a bit of a stretch at the end. B Eli - For a Netflix horror film, this was actually pretty decent. It's very basic but it didn't end the way most horror films telling that story would have. I appreciated that. C+ High Life - This is easily one of the worst films I've seen this year. It's less of a science fiction film and more about a study on sex. Robert Pattinson is not a compelling lead. I know the internet is obsessed with him right now but I find him to be pretty mediocre. The only decent thing is Mia Goth and Julie...

One of my goals for 2019 was to finally watch all the films I've had saved in my Netflix streaming queue for what seems like an eternity. I estimate that all of the titles below have been in my queue for at least a year. 41 total, and I did it! I'd like to thank the horrid winter we had this year that made a lot of this possible. Here are my very quick thoughts on all the titles in my black hole of a queue. Now only a few films + a bunch of TV shows are left in it. Time to binge all that TV, I guess.  The Life and Death of of Marsha P. Johnson - I had never heard of Marsha and was happy to learn about her but I think this doc tried to take on a bit too much at once. It was good, but could've been better - B The White Helmets - After watching the full length Last Men In Aleppo I never did get around to watching the short film following the same brave men helping save people in their war torn cities in Syria. This was very good and I'm glad more has been expand...

So my dumb ass released her Oscar predictions on Sunday and like I always do, I ball parked the short nominees because I never get to see them. Turns out, nearly all of these are available to watch online, so here are my quick reviews. The film summaries are copied from IMDb.  Documentary Shorts Period. End of Sentence - "In a rural village outside Delhi, India, women lead a quiet revolution. They fight against the deeply rooted stigma of menstruation." Can you believe this was funded through a bake sale? I thought that was pretty extraordinary. This is available to watch on Netflix and I thought it was a very amusing and inspiring. Inspiring because these women are doing great things and amusing to see so many dudes be uncomfortable talking about periods. At one point someone compares a pad to an unattractive but competent man. A- Black Sheep - "After the high-profile killing of Damilola Taylor, Cornelius' family move out of London. But when they discove...

Oh January releases. Since my theater hasn't seen it fit to bless my city with If Beale Street Could Talk yet, I've been spending a lot of my time with Netflix. One of my goals is to watch everything in my Instant queue before 2019 is up, but I've got all that nonsense in a separate post. Below are a few quick reviews courtesy of my DVD queue, with a few exceptions The Good Fair Game - Despite this staring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, apparently this never pinged my radar. (or it did and I forgot) but after watching Vice and hearing them reference this real life case, I was happy to see this was available to stream on Netflix - and I liked it! It's not amazing by any means but perfectly watchable. B Fyre - Everyone knows about the failed Fyre Festival at this point and who can resist Netflix and Hulu putting out documentaries at the same time? Fyre is Netflix's and is far superior to the Hulu doc because it doesn't try to blame millennials for everything....