We’re back with 4 more reviews of films that are up for Oscar consideration, a couple of which are on DVD, so you can check ’em out at home.

First up, Children of Men, a fine, stark yet flawed dystopian thriller that, while sporting some dazzling filmmaking hardly involves with its story about a world plagued by infertility and on the verge of collapse. Clive Owen’s performance is actorly in a manner that fails to engage, while Julianne Moore is in the picture for such a short while it’s a wonder that her name even made it into the credits. Lots of critics liked this film, but VanRamblings is not among those that found it “gritty, disturbing, solemn or haunting.”
Half Nelson, on the other hand, now here’s a slice of life drama that is wholly absorbing despite its low budget and generally lacklustre production values. Ryan Gosling’s performance as a drug-addicted inner-city school teacher is human scale, watchable and near mesmerizing (and very much deserving of an Oscar), while 13-year-old newcomer Shareeka Epps gives as good as she gets. Absolutely one of the best films of 2006 — and now on DVD for rental.
Now, you’d think that The Last King of Scotland would be heavy fare and a slog to get through, but you’d be wrong. Forest Whitaker’s larger than life performance as African dictator, Idi Amin — charismatic, trained by the British, and home to create chaos in Uganda during his eight-year reign — may be menacing, but he’s also horrifically engaging and possessed of a wry sense of humour. Prediction: Whitaker will win Best Actor for his performance.
Little Miss Sunshine can garner all the accolades it wants, but you’re not gonna find unadulterated praise for this rather pedestrian film in this corner. A too cute and rather mundane road movie chock full of odd “characters” rather than relatable people, there’s a cleverness, no doubt, in this Oscar nominated picture, but when it comes to films emerging from January’s Sundance Film Festival, give me a Quinceañera any day of the week. Strained, foul-mouthed and verging on the grotesque, from VanRamblings’ standpoint Little Miss Sunshine is much ado about not very much. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

As the 79th annual Academy Awards ceremony approaches (Sunday, February 25th), VanRamblings will set about to offer you our take on the various 2006 films up for Oscar consideration.

First up, there’s Babel, the pick o’ the bunch here, a powerful, melancholy, wholly transcendent film and, often, very difficult film to watch. Just when the conditions of a characters’ life becomes almost too unbearable to endure, the narrative switches — to the Moroccan desert, Los Angeles, Tijuana or Tokyo — to another one of the four interwoven stories. Heartbreaking, humane and devastatingly brilliant, Babel is the odds on favourite for Best Picture.
Absolutely one of the best films to come out of Hollywood in 2006, who knows why the members of the Academy slighted Dreamgirls? Conjecture runs from the supposition that producer David Geffen is hated in Hollywood, to allegations of racism and homophobia, but whatever the politics behind the snub, Dreamgirls remains one of the most important films of 2006, an entertaining and always involving celebration of the movie musical at its very best.
Delicious. Brilliantly adapted by playwright Patrick Marber from Zoë Heller’s acclaimed novel, Notes on a Scandal is elegant, pitch-black filmmaking at its very best, with a marvelous and stunningly gorgeous Cate Blanchett, and a scarily effective, misanthropic and unrelenting Dame Judi Dench, at its centre. Gothic, gripping filmmaking of the first order (à la Fatal Attraction, but with a great deal more wit), Notes on a Scandal offers a refreshingly literate battle royale involving colleagues undone by sexual desire, and another cineplex must-see Oscar contender.
Pedestrian, conventional filmmaking, The Pursuit of Happyness is a modest Tinseltown success at best, a quasi-inspirational, feel-good fairy tale that holds the accumulation of material wealth as the raison d’être of life. At least it’s not sappy, though. We’ve all been through tough times, but this film is so unrelentingly bleak at times it verges on unreality. If a slick and gleaming pull yourself up by your own bootstraps flick is your cup o’ tea, then this is likely the film for you.

(Click on the ‘picture’ above for a larger, more expansive version of the chart)

Yes, it’s that salutary time of year again, when the Hollywood floodgates open and movie lovers across the globe get to bathe themselves in the kind of serious, adult-minded movie fare that spells Oscar.
Over the course of the next six weeks, Tinseltown will release more than four dozen prestige pics, most of which will vie for Oscar attention. Of course, only five will be honoured with one of those cherished Best Picture nominations, but there’s always Best Actress / Supporting Actress, Best Actor / Supporting Actor, and Best Director to consider. In Hollywood, everyone deserving comes away with something, even if it’s just the Oscar nod that places a studio pic in contention, a prize itself of sorts.
Having taken a look at the insider websites and blogs which focus on the upcoming Oscar race — including Oscarwatch, The Gurus o’ Gold (from MovieCityNews), the Oscar Igloo, Gold Derby (from the Los Angeles Times), In Contention, and Jeffrey Wells’ Oscar Balloon, among others — VanRamblings is confident that the chart above pretty much covers the main contenders for 2006 — although, we’ll admit that we’re partial to Little Children, which we consider to be the best American film of the year, and were probably a bit kinder to the film than is the case with some critics.
All said, though, there are actors and actresses, other than those listed above, who may garner Oscar recognition, this upcoming February 25th.
In the Best Supporting Actress category, for instance, buzz continues to build for Vanessa Redgrave (Venus), Anika Noui Rose (Dreamgirls), Juliette Binoche (Breaking and Entering), Emma Thompson (Stranger Than Fiction), Gillian Anderson (The Last King of Scotland), Sandra Bullock (Infamous), Salma Hayek (Lonely Hearts), Demi Moore (Bobby), and Ellen Burstyn (The Fountain). Any one of these fine actresses could displace one of the Oscar contenders currently listed in the top five for this category.
In the Best Supporting Actor category, Ewan McGregor could get a nomination for Miss Potter, as could Michael Pena for World Trade Center. James McEvoy (The Last King Of Scotland), Freddy Rodriguez (Bobby), James Cromwell (The Queen), Michael Caine (Children of Men), and Albert Finney (A Good Year) are also receiving consideration.
In the Best Actor and Actress categories, the first four contenders would seem to be a lock, with fifth position up for grabs among the remaining eight contenders in each category.
Whatever the case, there are a good many films for you to see this upcoming holiday movie season.
Of those currently in release, VanRamblings highly recommends: Babel, a moving and often difficult to watch parable of disconnection and melancholy, but still one of the best American films of the year; The Last King of Scotland, a riveting portrait of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, with an outstanding performance by Forest Whitaker in the lead role; Todd Field’s Little Children, the best American film of 2006, now playing exclusively at Tinseltown, just off Yaletown; Philip Noyce’s Catch A Fire (a very good film, even if no one is bothering to attend screenings of one of the better films of the year); Flags of Our Fathers, a not entirely successful film for director Clint Eastwood, but very well made nonetheless; and, the well-reviewed and unexpected late comer to the Oscar table, Casino Royale, a re-inventing of the Bond saga, gritty, taciturn and surprisingly often, poignant.
We’re not quite as enthused about Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, which VanRamblings believes is far from the director’s best work. Nor are we particularly excited about The Queen, which is workmanlike, but hardly thrilling, revelatory or moving in any meaningful way. As for Little Miss Sunshine, VanRamblings feels this indie film is much ado about not very much (we much preferred the Sundance winner, Quinceañera).
We eagerly await what is bound to be an overwhelmingly positive reception for the odds-on-favourite for a Best Picture Oscar, Dreamgirls (opening Christmas Day in Vancouver), the feel-good family film of the holiday season, with a breakout performance from newcomer Jennifer Hudson. VanRamblings loved this film when we saw it at an early media screening.
Other films to keep an eye out for include Robert DeNiro’s sophomore film behind the camera, The Good Shepherd; Steven Soderbergh’s, The Good German; Notes On A Scandal, starring probable Oscar nominees, Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett; and Miss Potter, the story of Beatrix Potter, the author of the beloved and best-selling children’s book, “The Tale of Peter Rabbit”, with possible Oscar nominee Renée Zelwegger in the title role.
Then, there’s the Tony award-winning, The History Boys; probable Oscar nominee Leonardo diCaprio, in Blood Diamond; The Pursuit of Happyness (set for release on December 15th), starring Will Smith (and his young son) in what should prove to be a box-office smash over the Christmas season; Peter O’Toole in Venus; Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver; Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth; Sienna Miller in Factory Girl, the story of Andy Warhol protégé Edie Sedgwick; and, in the indie category, the Sundance film, Come Early Morning, among other worthy film fare to look forward to.
There’s lots to see. For video previews of all the films listed in this posting, surf on over to Apple’s Quicktime trailers site, or go to YouTube.
Chances are, we’ll be seeing you at the movies this holiday season.

by Nora Ephron
reprinted from the April 7th New York Times
We went to the movies the other night. We live in New York City, where it costs $10.75 to see a movie, which doesn’t include the $1.50 surcharge for buying the tickets ahead of time online. I love buying tickets ahead of time online. One of the miracles of modern life, as far as I’m concerned, is that moment when you enter a movie theater, stick your credit card into a machine and it spits the exact tickets you ordered straight out at you. Every time it happens, I just want to say, I don’t believe it! This is great!!
On the other hand, it turns out that there’s a new technological advance in the buying-tickets-ahead-of-time department that takes all the fun out of it: you can now print out your confirmation at home, skip the machine and go straight to the ticket taker. The ticket taker then scans your printout and prints the tickets right at the entrance to the theater thus holding up all the people behind you in the ticket line, eliminating the one miraculous moment you used to be able to count on when going to see a movie.
But the other night, as it turned out, we didn’t have to give our printout to the ticket taker, because when we walked into the theater, there was no ticket taker. The entrance to the theater was empty of personnel. The other customers just walked right in without giving their tickets to anyone, and we did too.
We trooped two flights downstairs to Theater 7, expecting to bump into a ticket taker on our way to the theater, but we never did. We had also hoped to buy something to eat, but the lower-level refreshment counter was closed and the popcorn was just sitting there, getting stale.
I should probably say at this point that the theater we went to was the Loews Orpheum 7, at 86th Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan. I should probably also say that the Loews Orpheum 7 is owned by AMC, but it used to be owned by Loews Cineplex Entertainment Corporation, and when it was, I was on the company’s board.
This was a sad experience in my life because I had modestly hoped, in my role as a board member, to do something about the unbelievably low quality of the food sold in movie theaters. As it turned out, no one at Loews cared about what I thought about the food sold in theaters.
So I dutifully attended the board meetings and was subjected to a series of PowerPoint presentations that were meant to validate the company’s policy of building costly, large cineplexes, most of them conveniently situated right across the street from other costly, large cineplexes being built by rival theater companies.
One day, about two years into my tenure, I was staying in Los Angeles, in a hotel, and I attended a Loews board meeting by telephone; it was so boring that I decided to leave for a while and get a manicure downstairs.
When I got back to my room, only 20 minutes later, everyone was screaming at one another on the telephone. I didn’t want to admit I had left the room — and by the way, no one had even noticed — so I listened for a while and realized that while I’d been out having my nails done, the company had gone bankrupt.
This was a shock to me and to everyone else on the board. I never did find out why the news hadn’t been mentioned earlier in the board meeting, but that of course was one of the reasons everyone was screaming at one another. I mean, there were people on the board whose companies owned shares in Loews who had just found out that they’d lost hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of a bankruptcy no one had even had the courtesy to warn them about. It wasn’t even on the agenda!
A few months later some investors from Canada and California bought Loews at a bargain basement price. Two years later, AMC Entertainment took over, and as far as I can tell it has done nothing whatsoever to improve the food sold at the refreshment counter or anything else.
Anyway, the other night. We passed the shuttered refreshment counter, went into the theater and sat down. The ads were already playing. There were quite a few of them, including a diet cola ad involving trucks and motorcycles that was so in love with itself that it actually recommended going to a special Web site that explained how the ad had been made.

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