Oscar films nominated that deserved the win

The Academy is referred to as a mystical entity.
It's hated more than Republicans or Democrats or Independents.
People still don't know how it works, despite the innovations of internet.
And we all know they don't watch the films and just pick based on what critics choose,
AS LONG AS THEY UNDERSTAND THE FILM

Bold refers to the fact that the best nominee won.

1929/30: All Quiet on the Western Front
1931/32: Grand Hotel
1932/33: A Farewell to Arms
1934: Cleopatra
1935: The Informer
1936: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
1937: The Life of Emilie Zola
1938: La Grande/Grand Illusion
1939: The Wizard of Oz
1940: The Great Dictator
1941: Citizen Kane
1942: The Magnificient Ambersons
1943: Casablanca
1944: Double Indemnity
1945: The Lost Weekend
1946: The Best Years of Our Lives
1948: Treasure of the Sierra Madre
1950: All About Eve
1951: A Streetcar Named Desire
1952: High Noon
1956: Giant
1957: Bridge on the River Kwai/12 Angry Men/Sayonara
1959: The Diary of Anne Frank/Anatomy of a Murder
1963: How the West Was Won
1964: Dr. Strangelove
1965: The Sound of Music
1966: A Man for All Seasons
1967: Bonnie and Clyde
1968: Oliver!
1969: Midnight Cowboy
1970: MASH
1972: The Godfather
1973: The Exorcist
1974: The Conversation
1975: Barry Lyndon
1976: Taxi Driver
1977: Star Wars
1978: The Deer Hunter
1979: Apocalypse Now
1980: Ordinary People
1981: Raiders of the Lost Ark
1982: E.T. the Extra Terrestrial
1983: The Right Stuff
1984: The Killing Fields
1985: The Color Purple
1986: Platoon
1987: The Last Emperor
1988: The Last Temptation of Christ
1989: My Left Foot
1990: Goodfellas
1991: Silence of the Lambs
1992: Unforgiven
1993: Schindler's List
1994: Pulp Fiction
1995: Sense and Sensibility
1996: The English Patient
1997: Good Will Hunting
1998: The Thin Red Line
1999: American Beauty
2000: Gladiator
2001: A Beautiful Mind
2002: Gangs of New York
2003: Lost in Translation
2004: The Aviator
2005: Munich
2006: Babel
2007: There Will Be Blood
2008: WALL-E
2009: District 9
2010: Inception
2011: The Tree of Life
2012: The Master
2013: The Wolf of Wall Street
2014: Birdman

The 10th Anniversary of 2004

Actor

1. Tony Leung
2. Leonardo DiCaprio
3. Ron Perlman
4. Christian Bale
5. Jamie Foxx/Jim Carrey

Actress

1. Zhang Ziyi's finest role
2. Sophie Okonedo
3. Kate Winslet
4. Hilary Swank
5. Natalie Portman

Supporting Actor

1. Fana Mokoena
2. Tom Cruise
3. Gary Oldman

Director:

1. Wong Kar-wai
2. Michel Gondry
3. Shane Carruth
4. Terry George
5. Kim Ki-Duk

Writer:
Charlie Kaufman
Shane Carruth
Scott Kosar

Best Adapted Screenplay
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

1. 2046
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by Michel Gondry
3. Primer Shane Carruth
4. Million Dollar Baby
5. 3-Iron by Kim Ki Duk
6. Shrek 2
7. Hotel Rwanda by Terry George
8. Garden State
9. The Machinist
10. Finding Neverland
11. Hellboy
12. Collateral
13. Monster
14. Prisoner of Azkaban
15. The Polar Express

The 5th anniversary of Transforminators: Salvation

I really like the fx and the design
Everything's dirty and gritty way more than Blade Runner, although that wasn't the point of Blade Runner, and that manner was a bit more cinematic.

Kyle Reese is too young for us to care about him. Not quite Phantom Menace bad.
Christian Bale's good, but there's nothing interesting for John Connor to do than have him yell.
Sam Worthington's character is a bit of a disappointment, albeit his entire destiny is sort of having to do with fate or something.
Mrs. Connor doesn't really have anything to do.
And there's a hot native American who can kick butt.

It recycles and complicates the theme of a robot being sentient somewhat adding a time travel element with a dead man.

The element of a robot with a heart saving John Connors life was sorta ironic, but interesting. However, he was the main selling point of the film, so it was weird killing him off.
The characters aren't really iconic or classic
And from the T cycle that's way too simple to use and hack.

Furthermore, there's a lot of reasons that we don't get immersed in it like we do in the other Terminator films:

• No anticorporate theme
• No time travel
• Very militaristic
• The rape scene isn't done with class only to appeal to a teens perception of what's dark.

Best Time Travel Films

Thanks to Interstellar being on the top of my films list, I decided to make a list of the top 30 time travel films. Here they are.

1. Interstellar
2. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
3. La Jetee
4. Primer
5. X-Men: Days of Future Past
6. Planet of the Apes
7. Back to the Future
8. The Terminator
9. Superman
10. T2
11. The Girl Who Leapt Thru Time
12. Donnie Darko
13. Looper
14. A Christmas Carol
15. A Muppet Christmas Carol
16. Back to the Future Part II
17. Escape From the Planet of the Apes
18. Masters of the Universe
19. Midnight in Paris
20. Somewhere in Time
21. Groundhog's Day
22. Back to the Future Part III
23. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
24. Time Bandits
25. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
26. Inuyasha the Movie: The Castle Beyond the Looking Glass
27. Disney's Mickey's Christmas Carol
28. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III
29. The Time Machine
30. Hot Tub Time Machine

The 35th Anniversary of 1979

Film:

1. Apocalypse Now
2. The Warriors
3. Alien
4. Stalker
5. The Black Stallion
6. Star Trek: The Motion Picture
7. The Tin Drum
8. All that Jazz
9. The Amityville Horror
10. Tess
11. The Muppet Movie
12. Manhattan
13. Norma Rae
14. Wise Blood
15. Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears
16. Kramer vs Kramer
17. Dracula (Frank Langella, Donald Pleasance)
18. David
19. Rocky II
20. Time After Time

Director:

1. Ridley Scott
2. Francis Ford Coppola
3. Andrei Tarkovsky
4. Walter Hill, The Warriors
5. Volker Schorndorff, The Tin Drum
6. Caroll Ballard, The Black Stallion
7. Peter Lilienthal, David
8. Bob Fosse
9. Robert Wise, Star Trek: The Motion Picture
10. Roman Polanski
11. John Huston, Wise Blood
12. Jim Henson

Producer: Walter Hill

Actor:

• Dustin Hoffman, 
• David Bennete
• Brad Dourif
• Alexander Kaidanovsky
• Jim Henson

Actress:

• Meryl Streep, 
• Sigourney Weaver
• Nastassja Kinski
• Sally Field, Norma Rae
• Frank Oz

Supporting Actor:
Marlon Brando
Bolaji Bodejo
David Patrick Kelley, Luther, The Warriors
James Remar, Ajax, The Warriors
Jim Henson


Supporting Actress:
Persis Khambatta, Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Veronica Cartwright


Best Animal: The Black Stallion

Muppet Christmas Carol criticisms: Michael Caine and the fantasy of Christmas

I really enjoy A Muppet Christmas Carol. I remember the songs like the back of my hand. The production designs are great compared to the more recent Muppet films that are basically just the Dark Knight set, which consists of exterior locations. (I didn't even notice that Michael Caine was in both when I wrote that observation!)
This growing up was my favorite Muppet media, besides Muppet Babies and the Muppet Show.
I was lucky enough to have bought it on VHS, which is still intact with the song "When Love is Gone." I bought the VHS at my local Pathmark, which is still around, with my brother or I sitting in the baby seat of the cart.

 

Anyways, there's two main problems with this film.
Michael, Caine.
He plays the character of Scrooge a bit too dark for a kid like me to enjoy it, noticeably when stating that he would not mind decreasing the surplus population when Beaker's friend states that people would rather die than live in the poor houses.
It also doesn't help that according to Wikipedia that Caine is a conservative having discussed topics such as

• his disdain for increasing taxes on the rich (LIKE HIMSELF)
• bringing young people back to conscription and public service
• and discussing other people's pay such as benefits when being helped out by the government

Perhaps, when Dickens wrote the film, he imagined it as a bit of a parody of Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, where people magically turn into happy people during Christmas, an ultimately misunderstood aspect in the film, in amidst the themes of being rich, unhappy and/or selfish.

The 50th Anniversary of Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan

I've only watched a few Masaki Kobayashi films. One of them being Harakiri which inspired the 2000s film, very methodical, 60s Palme D'or acting based, all building up Hitchcock suspense and tension up to the seppuku.
The film is like watching four Draculas, four Wizard of Ozes. All four endings are great because of their abruptness.
(I'm sorry for basically making this a plot summary, but it's 60s Palme D'or. A little hard to get! XD So watch on Hulu, then come back.)
The film starts with a writer writing the 4 stories but in one timeline.
The husband wanting to live with his wife opposed to divorcing her. He loves her more than everything in the world, only to see her become the ghost of herself, a bag of bones, death, a doppleganger, so many things she isn’t. Theme of the conservative’s perception of family, love and marriage, obsession, addiction. Very similar to the works of Kaneto Shindo and the feminist ghost, haunting the chauvinist pig in a liberal world. Materialism and beauty opposed to actually getting to know a woman. The woman becomes a ghost, no longer a human, treated as a thing.
The next segment deals with a female ghost, who may have been the same one in the first segment haunting another man who is about to die in battle, cold, seeking warmth. She comforts him and gives him life from some sort of motherly-wifely mix but threatens to kill him if he mistreats a woman.
The third segment deals with a blind woman, and the men who mistreat her.
Feminine man. Multicolored Samurai. The shadows and editing effects making him look like a ghost. I debate it would’ve looked better if they had done a simpler less elaborate set up using only the shadows.
Water, mirrors, reflection and light are a key aspect of the film. The symbol of ghosts is represented through the cup of water, possibly also a reference to the ink of a pen.
There's a lot of good production valuie. A great wood red painting.
“I can imagine several possible endings. But none of them would satisfy your imagination. I would rather you decide for yourself.”
It’s quite a beautiful movie, with some of the most innovative writing and direction. It deserved the Palme D’or.

5th Anniversary of the Kinema Junpo Top 10: My Top 10 Non-Japanese Films of All Time

1. Eyes Wide Shut
2. Mulholland Drive
3. Blade Runner
4. The Shining
5. Punch-Drunk Love
6. The Matrix
7. Ghostbusters
8. Metropolis
9. Vertigo
10. Heaven’s Gate

5th Anniversary of the Kinema Junpo Top 10: My Top 10 Japanese Films of All Time

1. Rashomon
2. Cruel Story of Youth
3. Godzilla
4. House
5. The Naked Island
6. In the Realm of the Senses
7. The Demon
8. Branded to Kill
9. Ikiru
10. Ballad of Narayama

Trey Parker won the award for Best Male Performance

FULK!
Why was he even nominated?!