Why not save the best for last? It doesn’t always work out that way, but The Revenant was the final movie released in 2015. In fact, except for in a few select theaters in a few select cities, you couldn’t see the film until January 7th. Was it worth the wait? Absolutely it was. It seems like we’ve seen trailers for months building this movie up. Each time I saw a preview, I couldn’t help but get excited. I believe that this might have been my most anticipated movie since Shutter Island, and with that movie, I had reason to be wary because it was a 2010 movie released in February. You usually don’t get the best films of the year released that early in the year. While Shutter Island exceeded expectations, The Revenant was all that and more. Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street, The Great Gatsby) has been burned by the Academy many times before. While The Revenant is his fifth Academy Award nomination for acting, he should have at least three or four more. None of those past omissions matter now, as DiCaprio is the front runner to win Best Actor this year. I wouldn’t quite qualify him as a lock to win, but it is only a two-actor race, and his performance was more impressive than the fabulous performance given by Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl.
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Category Archives: Year of Release
Concussion (2015)
Continuing the theme of 2015 awards season movie releases failing to meet expectations because of the lack of emotional audience engagement comes Concussion, a true story dealing with the effects of professional football concussions. The movie, set in 1982 Pittsburgh, begins with one of the city’s most recognizable faces (Mike Webster of the Super Bowl-winning Steelers teams of the ’70s) living in his truck and slowly losing his mind. Mike (David Morse – The Green Mile, Disturbia) gives the most poignant performance in the entire movie. In a film where we could and should care for all sorts of characters, Mike is the only supporting character who drives out any emotion in us or allows us to feel any empathy. In just a few short scenes, Mike can convey to us that despite what his doctors say, he has significant life problems that are a result of something that happened to his mind from the time he retired in 1990 until the time frame at the start of the film (2002). His 14-year career included 150 straight games as a starting center from 1976 to 1986.
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Joy (2015)
Joy is the epitome of a very average movie with a standout lead performance. Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle) will most definitely earn her fourth Academy Award nomination (third for Lead Actress) in five years for her role as the title character. Still, she does not have a chance to win. I think she would have had a shot had the movie been better received with critics and audiences, but it likely would not have been enough to knock off favorites Brie Larson (Room), Saoirse Ronan (Brooklyn), or Charlotte Rampling (45 Years). Lawrence and Cate Blanchette (Carol) likely will be the final two nominations, with Carey Mulligan (Suffragette) having an outside chance to spoil.
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Carol (2015)
Every once in a while, you see a series of trailers that convince you that a movie will be awesome. Sometimes this holds to be true, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you convince yourself that a film is going to be amazing based upon the trailers alone. And then, when the critics support your belief by giving the movie high praise, you head into that movie thinking that you are about to see something exceptional. I thought Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven, I’m Not There) was about to strike gold with Carol. He had the players. With apologies to Jennifer Lawrence, Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) is the current leading lady in Hollywood. When I first heard Blanchett’s soothing voice-over speaking to an unidentified character during a trailer with lots of drama, strife, and unpopular decisions with the leads, I could not help but be engrossed. I don’t know who created this trailer, but this individual should have directed Carol rather than Haynes because they brought more drama to a two-minute snippet than Haynes brought in two hours. This isn’t an exaggeration. The trailer is THAT good, and the movie is THAT disenchanting. Blanchett’s dramas are heavy, and she is at her absolute best when she plays a character who is lost in her confusion. So why wasn’t Carol the movie of the year? My belief was because Haynes and Blanchett blew it. The film lacked all of the drama that the preview led you to believe that it had. And Blanchett’s performance wasn’t so flat as much as it was confusing. I based many of the reviews of other lead actresses this year around how I perceived Blanchett would be in Carol (incidentally, I did the same with Lawrence for her performance in Joy). I completely jumped the gun with both of these actresses and prematurely included them in the same sentences as Brie Larson (Room), Carey Mulligan (Suffragette), and Saoirse Ronan (Brooklyn). While I do believe Blanchett will get a nomination (primarily based on name recognition), it would be a travesty if she were to win over Larson or Ronan.
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The Danish Girl (2015)
The closer that each of my reviews is to awards season, the more unconventional they become. For the past four or five years, I’ve tried to see absolutely everything I can. If a movie gets nominated in one of the big six awards, I will see it regardless of how I feel about it. Sometimes this can be a painful experience, but it’s part of what I’m trying to do. So before I get into my review of The Danish Girl, I want to talk about the Best Actor Academy Award nomination category. In a year where the male lead performances have been far below the caliber that they have been in recent years, the battle for Best Actor comes down to two people. These include Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything, My Week With Marilyn) for this movie and Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant. When Matt Damon (The Martian) or Michael Fassbender (Steve Jobs) are the next guys in line behind these two, you know it’s a two-dog race. I am a massive fan of both Damon and Fassbender, but they each have at least three movies in their filmography in which they delivered better performances than the ones they gave this year.
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