December 27, 2004

• AllThingsMike: ElectricMovies Section

  The original tagline for “AllThingsMike” was “poetry, movie reviews, and stuff.” Over the years, the poetry and stuff have been updated and expanded, but the movie reviews, which were the basis for the 2002 spinoff site “ElectricMovies”, have been few and far between. I seem to write something at the end of each year profiling Oscar Hopefuls, but I haven’t really written too much about my passion for movies since I stopped writing the ElectricMovies Blog earlier this year.

  There is a “Reviews” section on this Blog, however, and I have written a few reviews for inclusion in this section since I began WhenWordsCollide. Not too many people use the “reviews” section of their blogs, but eventually I hope to update this section with musings about “movies that matter”, as I did with the ElectricMovies Blog.

  Oscar “Season” arrives during the Christmas Season, with the studios releasing their “prestige pictures”. The Golden Globes nominations have already been announced, and this year it seems to be a wide open “race” with a number of films, some which haven’t even been released widely, seemingly in competition for the Best of the Best. So far, of the Awards Season hopefuls, I have seen only a few. I’m not going out to the movies that often this year because of the high prices of movie tickets, but have seen and enjoyed “Ray”, the biopic about Ray Charles, and I just saw the new Martin Scorsese film, “The Aviator”, and I’ve written a review of this film.

  My early choice for “Best Picture” was Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” and I even favored the Michael Moore documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11″ when I first saw the film. Now, I’ve decided that the field shouldn’t include the Moore film, since Michael took it out of the documentary category. I still thought “The Notebook” was an excellent film, and wrote a review of it too when it came out, but it isn’t on Oscar radar at all. “Hotel Rwanda” is my next “must see” film, and the previews look rather good. Don Cheadle will probably get nominated in the acting category. I also think Michael Mann’s “Collateral” was excellent, although in essence a thriller, and had  stellar acting from both Tom Cruise and Jaime Fox (who is my “Best Actor” pick for “Ray”. I also very much want to see “Million Dollar Baby”, the Clint Eastwood film, which also has a lot of Oscar Buzz. “Baby” is getting to be my choice for Best Picture just because of it’s credibility. The critics even say it’s better than Eastwood’s last, the brutal but compelling “Mystic River.”

  Please check out the “Reviews” section on WhenWordsCollide if you haven’t already.  Latest Review is “The Aviator”. Other movie reviews I have written since my website went online in 1999 are in the Archives section on ElectricMovies.

  I haven’t really seen a lot of Movie Themed Blogs here at Xanga. I’ll have to investigate to see if there are any interesting movie buffs blogging about their opinions.

  • 3:27 pm
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