{"id":4493,"date":"2011-02-18T21:42:39","date_gmt":"2011-02-19T04:42:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/?p=4493"},"modified":"2011-02-19T12:39:24","modified_gmt":"2011-02-19T19:39:24","slug":"best-picture-reviews-127-hours-the-social-network-toy-story-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/2011\/02\/18\/best-picture-reviews-127-hours-the-social-network-toy-story-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Best Picture Reviews: 127 Hours, The Social Network, Toy Story 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my self-assigned tasks<\/a> is to view and provide capsule reviews for all 10 Best Picture nominees prior to the Academy Awards. Here are the first three.
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\n127 Hours<\/u><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what idiot at 20th Century Fox entrusted the 127 hours screenplay to Danny Boyle–a director best known for movies about game shows<\/a> and zombies<\/a>–but that idiot is a genius!<\/em>. Of course that assumes there was a screenplay at all, and not just a five-page treatement that said stuff like “bunch of shots of the main dude riding his bike here” and “now he screams for like five minutes”. <\/p>\n

Like everyone I was leery of this film due to the subject matter, and fully expected it to be quasi-horror tragedy-porn or inspirational triumph-over-odds glurge. Maybe it was, originally. But between Boyle\u2019s direction, and the unmazing cinematography of Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak (Mantle also did the cinematography for Slumdog Millionaire<\/em>, it winds up being more of a meditation on existentialism. Somehow. <\/p>\n

Not Best Picture material, but waay better than I expected. That said: WTF product placements? Seriously, the guy is trapped alone in a cave and they still figure out a way to plug a credit card? Shameless. If there was a name-brand urine, that\u2019s probably what they would have shown Franco imbibing.
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\nThe Social Network<\/u><\/p>\n

I am probably the biggest fan of Aaron Sorkin than has never seen an episode of The West Wing<\/em> (it\u2019s in my queue, I swear!), but Sports Night<\/em> is easily one of my favorite shows ever, and I thought the dialogue in Charlie Wilson\u2019s War<\/em> was top-shelf. So even though I did not know he was the screenwriter for The Social Network<\/em> as I walked into the cinema, I figured it out after about the first machine-gunned 17 words. <\/p>\n

The story and pacing of The Social Network<\/em> are fairly pedestrian, and the film\u2019s accuracy has been called into question. But, as in pretty much everything Sorkin does, the plot is mostly there just so the characters can pontificate on the philosophical implications of the plot. That\u2019s A-OK in my book, as social media (and Facebook in particular) is a subject of particular fascination to me. (Although I\u2019ll confess to finding the final scene of the film waaaay too contrived.) I also concur with other nerdanaylsists in declaring that, even though it\u2019s only 2011, we are unlikely to see a better use of \u201cwget\u201d in a movie this decade.
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\nToy Story 3<\/u><\/p>\n

My enthusiasm for animated movies is well<\/a> publicised<\/a> but, in the case of Toy Story 3<\/em>, that zeal was perfectly balanced by my innate wariness of any film that ends in a 3 (a phobia no doubt instilled by my childhood exposure to Superman 3<\/em>). Thus, I waited to catch it on DVD. But it absolutely lived up to the dazzlingly high standard set by the previous two films, and managed to do so even though the novelty of talking toys had long since worn off. And just as Andy has matured, so too have the themes explored by the series, as this installment is less a routine adventure tale and more an examination of obsolescence and mortality. That doesn\u2019t prevent the filmmakers from packing nearly every scene with clever sight gags and references that you only catch on your second viewing, though. Toy Story<\/em> will rightly go down as one of the greatest trilogies ever made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my self-assigned tasks is to view and provide capsule reviews for all 10 Best Picture nominees prior to the Academy Awards. Here are the first three.     127 Hours I don\u2019t know what idiot at 20th Century Fox entrusted the 127 hours screenplay to Danny Boyle–a director best known for movies about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","category-projects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4493"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4516,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4493\/revisions\/4516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}