Monsieur Lazhar is nominated for Best Foreign Language film. In my country, it’s a domestic language. It was even made in my country. It’s the Canadian entry to to The Oscars. Last year, Canada’s entry was a film called Incendies. Both these films are about immigrants in Montreal. Both these films are depressing. However, beyond that, both these films are completely different.

In a Montreal elementary school, a student is heading to class ahead of his classmates, finds the door locked, peaks in to find his teacher’s corpse hanging from the ceiling.

Not a happy start.

I hope to never work with elementary teachers who would do that to their students. So far none of my colleagues have¹.

In the aftermath of the mayhem, a man appears in the Principal’s office offering his services as a teacher. He claims to be a teacher for the previous 19 years while in Albania, but had just received his Canadian permanent residency.

Turns out that’s not the truth! Apparently he’s fighting for refugee status, after his wife and children were killed in a fire in their apartment building. Turns out his wife wrote a book that upset a lot of people.

I’ll stop giving away the film. It’s damn good. I only had one major problem with it. They kept on speaking French. Umm… hello… I don’t speak French. Je ne parle pas français.

Though I did enjoy watching the students endure the torture of conjugating verbs in English. Us Anglos in Ontario had to endure a similar torture as we conjugated French verbs.

1. Fingers crossed! [↩]

Watching his father die, and live his last years out of the closet, Ewan McGregor plays a man who sees love for the first time through his septuagenarian father’s eyes. As a child he was close to his mother, and saw her loneliness, this shaped his life view, and how he experienced love.

After his father dies of cancer, he meets an actress at a party, and his mentality and attitudes towards his own future and how he lets others into his life.

It has Christopher Plummer being FABULOUS as a gay and out man in his seventies.

It also has this line, “Jewish girls are not pretty. They can be interesting or cute, but not pretty.” Always the Jews being self-deprecating.

I’ve seen films about the silent era before, but never before have I seen a film so wonderfully done, nor have I seen a silent film about the silent era.

The Artist is an absolutely fantastic love story about a rising star and a falling star.

I honestly don’t think I should say anymore except go watch it. Now.

Can you call a film about a man with a dying wife who discovers that his wife was cheating on him a fun film? Well, it was. It was an interesting film about Clooney coming to terms with his wife’s indiscretions and learning to be a father for the first time. In addition, there’s some B plot about his family owning property and selling it.

It’s an okay film, fun, entertaining, but in no way Oscar-worthy. There was nothing in this film screaming “FANTASTIC” at me, so I assume other people saw different things in the film than I did.

Either way, worth the watch.

What the fuck was I thinking? A cheesy Spielberg film, about a horse that goes to war? Why did I even bother? Oh yeah… Benedict Cumberbatch. After watching two seasons (aka six episodes) of the BBC’s Sherlock, how could I resist a film starring the wonderful and sarcastic and funny Sherlock Holmes… er, Benedict Cumberbatch.

This film goes to prove that no matter how good your actors are, you need a good script, and the script for War Horse is fucking terrible. I can’t remember the last time I disliked a film so much that I had to turn it off. War Horse, you won that prize.

Nominated for best Animated Short, I tried looking for all the films, and this was the only one I could find. I had already played with the incredible iPad app they made to tie into the film. It’s nice to finally see the film itself. Seeing as my playing was limited to 30 seconds. I never knew the plot of the app/film.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is a film about a man who gets caught up in a hurricane, only to be directed by a strange woman and some flying books to a library. It goes from there, it’s only 15 minutes, so I won’t ponder too much on the topic, but honestly I suggest you watch it. Quite entertaining and very well designed.

North American authors and Paris… there’s a strange mystic there. Whether you read Barney’s Version or read of the 1920s authors in Paris. Midnight in Paris is a sci-fi film about a modern-day Hollywood screenwriter who’s on vacation in Paris with his fiancée. The screenwriter has given up work for the time being to focus on his novel. He’s in love with the past, specifically Paris of the 1920s. One day, after wandering the streets of Paris alone, the clock strikes midnight, and an old car pulls up. He gets in the car and is whisked away into the 1920s where he meets the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and even gets Gertrude Stein to read his novel and give feedback.

The film uses sci-fi to tell the story of the inner mind of mankind. It’s an excellent film with only two flaws in my mind. 1) Woody Allen the writer and director obviously wrote himself as the lead, and Owen Wilson plays Woody Allen perfectly. His slight mannerisms, his nervousness, his Jewishness, his New Yorkiness, etc. It’s very distracting to see one actor playing another actor when there’s no reason for him to not make the character his own. 2) A tie is supposed to end at your belt buckle, Owen, not your belly button, you look silly.

I’ve been watching a lot of Oscar nominated films. At the suggestion of Lisa and Ruhee, I started with Moneyball.

I wouldn’t be fully able to trust Ruhee’s opinion on this film, as she actually likes baseball, but Lisa seems ambivalent towards the sport, so I thought I’d go along with her opinions.

For those unfamiliar, the film is a docudrama about a major league baseball team down the crapper with no money and hemorrhaging players. Brad Pitt is their General Manager, and he decides to hire Jonah Hill, a statistician, and together they build a team based on highest runs/$ they can get. It’s a strategy that hadn’t been done before, and after struggling, they find it works.

There’s a big moral that you don’t have to win the World Series to prove you won, blah blah blah, something like that.

Overall, It’s quite a good and entertaining film.

A new Sherlock Holmes film comes to theatres, and since I hadn’t seen the original of Guy Ritchie’s variant of Sherlock Holmes, I figured time had to come to watch it.

It’s hard not to compare it to Sherlock, the BBC series starring Benedict Cumberbatch, but it’s also stupid to resist it. Both are reimaginings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary character, and they’re both completely different in every way. While Sherlock is modernized, Sherlock Holmes are contemporary to the book. Sherlock is about Holmes’ mind, and Sherlock Holmes is an action film.

I cannot dismiss Sherlock Holmes as simply an action film, however. There’s a lot more to the Holmes character than just running around and punching others, as the trailers would have one believe, but the intellect, and resourcefulness of Holmes does not come across to the audience in the film. The audience does see the workings of Holmes’ mind, but it’s never anything that a slightly astute person could conclude on their own.

Whoever thought Ritchie was the person to helm a Sherlock Holmes film, obviously never read the books, and it seems that Ritchie had just finished OAC English, and was eager to show his knowledge of elementary symbolism. Yes, I get it, a crow is there, someone will die.  Wow, a crow representing death, that’s so clever little high school boy.

The special effects are jarring, as the majority of many shots are CGI, and look obviously like CGI. It removes one from the story.

I’ll still go see the sequel, as I’m not paying, apparently, and it’s a communal gathering with friends, but honestly, I look forward to New Years Day when I can watch the new episode of Sherlock.

For those unaware, The Inbetweeners is a British sitcom which ran three seasons of six episodes following the high school careers of four socially and sexually inept teenagers. It’s quite a funny show, so I was excited for a feature film to complete the series.

The premise of the film is that the four lads go abroad to get some broads¹. It’s a pretty basic premise, but what else are you going to do for an Inbetweeners feature film?

The film starts off pretty well with Tony Head playing Will’s father. Head tells Will that he’s got married, and didn’t invite him to the wedding. It’s a wonderful scene that captures Will’s character so well, a whiney twat that even his father doesn’t want to be around.

Sadly the film doesn’t continue that momentum. It’s basically a series of gags, that don’t always float. In addition, the film is about them actually succeeding, which is far from the humour of the television series, in which every attempt they ever make with women fails miserably.

There is one good thing I’ve taken from this film. It helps prove my theory, “If you see a penis, it’s a comedy; if you see a vagina, it’s a drama.”

Just watch the TV show.

1. See what I did there?!?! [↩]