Pleasantville Is An Impressive Showcase For Effective Satire, Memorable Visuals And Jeff Daniels

It's so much fun to go in totally cold into a first-time watch of a movie and become totally enchanted by discovering where exactly that movie is going. Movie marketing can be so spoiler-heavy, it's totally a wonder when the secrets and plot outline of a movie remain a mystery, especially when it's twenty-one-years-old like Pleasantville! The directorial debut of Gary Ross, I was aware of this movie being a star vehicle for Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon and that it was done in black-and-white but other than that, the concrete details of the production remained a mystery to me. This meant my first-time-viewing of Pleasantville turned out to be such a delightful experience as I got to unearth all the joys this movie has to offer!

Cast Your Vote For Alexander Payne's Best Move, Election

Matthew Broderick is an actor of stage and screen known for playing nice protagonists that your average moviegoer can easily root for. It's a trait of his that worked so well in Ferris Bueller's Day Off that people are still wearing "Save Ferris" T-Shirts all these years lost while the likes of The Lion King and Torch Song Trilogy also made strong use of his endearing nature. Yes, Broderick is talented at playing likable individuals but as Jimmy Stewart showed multiple times in his career, sometimes there's nothing more fun to watch than actors known for playing nice people going full-on creepy asshole. Broderick got to flex those kinds of antagonistic muscles with Alexander Payne's 1999 motion picture Election.

A Wrinkle In Time Tends to Stumble But It Also Tends To Inspire Mightily

The best part about A Wrinkle In Time is that it certainly maintains the weirdness of the source material it's adapting. Those worried that Madeleine L'Engle's original novel would be translated to the silver screen with all of it's more unusual tendencies ironed out can relax, director Ava DuVernay's adaptation of this book certainly does not reduce L'Engle's work to being a Hunger Games or Harry Potter knock-off. In the process of adapting such an unorthodox piece of literature, you get a movie that has a far bolder vision than your run-of-the-mill live-action family movie and thoroughly successful elements to its name while also having its fair share of stumbles along the way.

Sing Needs A Tune-Up

The highest piece of praise I can offer Sing is that it's the best motion picture created by Illumination Entertainment since the very first Despicable Me movie back in 2010. But considering that in the six year span since the first Despicable Me they've only made the likes of Hop, that forgettable Lorax movie, two middling Despicable Me follow-ups and this summer's blah The Secret Life Of Pets, that's not a high bar to clear. Even worse, taken on its own merits, Sing is just an average, inoffensive but extremely unmemorable kind of movie, one without much of anything in the way of a distinctive identity to lodge it into ones mind once the credits begin to roll.

My Current Best Acting Nominee Predictions!! (December 30, 2014 Edition)

Well, the nominations for the next Academy Awards ceremony will be released two weeks from this Thursday.So let's take a look at my current predictions for the two main acting categories, Best Actor and Best Actress, at the ceremony!

The Crazy, Crazy, Crazy Trailer For Inherent Vice Is Here

I've only seen two films of Paul Thomas Anderson (I know, I know, I'm simply awful), The Master and Punch-Drunk Love. The Master I found to be a film I admired very much, especially the outstanding performances in it, but it kind of just left me cold overall. Punch-Drunk Love was actually pretty great, though I did feel it occasionally lacked focus. But man have I been anticipating his next movie, Inherent Vice, which just unleashed it's first trailer, which you can watch below.