Who is this old guy hosting? Why is it suddenly okay to make jokes about racism? Dogs can go to the Oscars?

These may be the questions you ask yourself tonight during the Oscars if you haven’t been following Hollywood closely this season. Not to fret! I’m here with everything you need to know to follow the show and understand all the poorly-delivered presenter jokes. [Read more →]

In anticipation of the 84th Academy Awards ceremony to be held this Sunday night (7pm, ABC), BlogDailyHerald is once again breaking down the major categories for you.

If anything, 2011 was a year marked by nostalgia. Martin Scorsese’s 3D family film Hugo explored the birth of film as an imaginative medium, while its rival The Artist functioned as a love letter to the long-gone silent film genre. Gil Pender, the protagonist of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, contemplated whether nostalgia for a past decade should dominate one’s opinion of the present. The Muppets reminded us of the ragtag band of puppets we’d left behind with the birth of CGI. Of the Best Picture nominees, only one (The Descendants) didn’t take place in the past.

That being said, it’s appropriate that we take another look into the past, to celebrate the films of 2011 that awed and inspired (and sometimes underwhelmed) us. [Read more →]

If ever there were a blog post that aimed for absolute transparency, this would be it. Last week’s post on Disney’s 3-D re-release of The Lion King outlined 5 basic, unspecific things you probably didn’t realize about the film. That article, however, might as well have been a link to the film’s Wikipedia page (though I have a fantasy that the blog possesses a bit more gratuitous wit and ‘insight’ than Wiki’s sources). Anyway, I actually watched the movie last night, in 3-D, at Providence Place and amidst an audience that consisted of 33% Brown students, 33% students from other colleges and 33% people in fake Ed Hardy. Here are a few genuine observations about The Lion King in 3-D. [Read more →]

“Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaants ingonyamaaaaaaaaaaaa bagithi babaaa.” I’m sure each and every American child has been wondering what that phrase has meant since The Lion King first conquered our hearts and minds in the summer of 1994. Well after all these years you finally have your answer. It’s a Zulu phrase that translates to “There comes a lion.” Shocker. Seventeen years of waiting and it’s really that simple? Honestly, it may have been better had the words just been jibberish-in-the-style-of-Zulu. And that humming after those breathtaking opening lines? As you may have guessed, they’re equally disappointing: “Sithi uhhmm ingonyama” translates to “Oh yes, it’s a lion.” What’s next, do we find out the Simba was voiced by Ferris Bueller and JTT? Well, that’s true too.

So why all this Lion King talk? Sometime between Cars 2 and Tangled, Disney decided to celebrate The Lion King‘s 17.25 year anniversary with a 2 week theatrical re-release in….[drumroll]….3D! This way the company can get 16 dollars a ticket enchant a whole new generation of children with its modern classic. Read the 5 things your preschool-aged self definitely didn’t realize about Disney’s last great non-Pixar film after the jump. [Read more →]

With the Academy Awards only a few short days away (watch them this Sunday on ABC), here we are with a detailed breakdown of the major categories. Looking back, it was a pretty interesting year for film. Blockbusters like Toy Story 3 and Inception respected the intelligence of their audiences and garnered astounding critical acclaim. One of the most significant cultural institutions of our time was lampooned when The Social Network profiled Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Also, Little Fockers came out. Yes indeed, 2010 was a year for the books… [Read more →]

Laura Linney in "The Big C" — Courtesy of Showtime

Laura Linney ’86 just won a Golden Globe award for Best Performance by an Actress in a TV Series, Comedy or Musical, for her role in Showtime’s dark comedy, “The Big C.”  She plays Cathy Jamison, a woman grappling with the changed circumstances of her life after learning that she has terminal cancer. Linney was absent from the ceremony, due to a family situation.

Congratulations to a very successful Brown alum! You make all of us look good.

The Creative Arts Council is holding a wildly unpublicized advance screening tonight of a new Sean Penn movie, entitled Fair Game.

The film is based on the true story of Valerie Plame, a former CIA agent who made headlines in 2003 when she was outed as a covert agent. Naomi Watts portays Plame, and Penn plays her husband Joseph Wilson.

Presenting the film are director Doug Liman ’88 (who helmed The Bourne Identity, among other blockbusters) and producer Dave Bartis ’88. These two filmmakers and frequent collaborators helped start Brown Television back in the day, and also produced FOX’s “The O.C.”

Professor of International Studies James Der Derian will also be on hand for the panel discussion and Q&A which follow the film.

The event will take place at Salomon 101 at 7 PM, and the film’s trailer can be viewed here.

Oscar-nominating producer Noah Baumbach‘s next film centers on the lives of three Brown alumni—a writer struggling to complete a novel, a television producer, and a freelance critic—as they transition into their 30’s with personal and professional woes. The film based on Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Child (2006) is praised by literary critics (“near-miraculous perfection”), but apparently loathed by Amazon reviewers who gave it two-and-a-half stars.

After scanning the novel (thanks, Google books!), I’m going to have to side with Amazon-ers on this one. Not only are the fictional Brown alumni pretentious (and self-absorbed) but the writing is. I had trouble turning the pages–er pressing the arrow key–because of the unreadable prose. Maybe I’m just an unsophisticated reader of contemporary literature. Maybe this epic sentence is actually literary genius!?:

“She was writing, in this chapter, about the long-standing Western habit of dressing a child like someone else: like an older child, or like a parent, or like someone entirely; and she was comparing this to those ventriloquists whose dummies were attired to match them, among other things, and making, or attempting to, a broader point about how children have been seen as emanations of their parents, and she needed to fit in there somehow the inverse argument, based around, say, the Laura Ashley ensembles of the seventies, in which mother and daughter both were swathed in frilly floral smocks in a reenactment—or curiously ironic restatement, perhaps, in the era of women’s sexual liberation—of Victorian girlhood, in which case the question was, were they all, mothers and daughters, celebrating the repression of their sexuality, or its untrammeling”?

I’ll probably watch the film adaption anyway because I liked Baumbach’s most recent work Greenberg. Hopefully he’ll tweak the characters in The Emperors’ Child so they’re not so whiny and dull.