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Lion (2016) - Overall, nice movie with some really good elements to it.

Now me personally, I had some big problems with what I saw as self-defeating stupidity in the guy's search for his long lost home. He kinda pissed me off with his extreme torment - yet he didn't do so many painfully obvious things that could have sped up the process.

It reminded me of the movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly where dudeguy who could only communicate by blinking - so his caregivers would recite the alphabet - over and over - and he would blink when they needed to stop - and he spelled things that way - one letter at a time - and I'm like START BY TEACHING THE FUCKING GUY MORSE CODE YOU GINORMOUS MORONS!!

The guy in Lion just went about things stupidly and I didn't like him a ton and that affected my enjoyment of the movie. But that aside, it was a pretty interesting tale of a lost little boy - which intersects with two incredible people, his Australian adoptive parents. They would be a great subject regardless of who they ended up adopting. And then the epic ending. Very good.

7.3 out of 10

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The Crown - Season 1 - 2016 - Spectacularly great show. Inspired writing and character/relationship development. Classy and absorbing. Educational - but without ever feeling like homework.

And then if you want to talk about cinematography and sets and costumes - how does it look? ---> off-the-charts.

As a guy whose all-time favorite series' are The Wire and Deadwood and The Sopranos, I did not anticipate The Crown as maybe completing my Mount Rushmore.

But it's possible.

Gotta keep it up for more than 1 season though. - so we'll see.

9.1 out of 10

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Okay so let's see what we got.

The 9 Best Picture nominees in order of all-important Mudcat rating:

Manchester by the Sea.........8.3
Arrival................................8.2
Fences...............................7.9
Hell or High Water................7.6
Hidden Figures.....................7.4
Lion...................................7.3
La La Land..........................7.2
Moonlight............................7
Hacksaw Ridge.....................4.4
 
Nice batch, I gotta say. While Manchester is very good, there is no all-timer standout, however I recall a couple years out of the last ~5 where my top pic of the nominees was like a 7.2

So good.

Arrival is a tough call that I continue to noodle on. *slight conceptual spoiler alert* With the thing about time being one constant thing rather than the linear thing we experience - there is stuff that can be looked upon as paradoxical. You could say the ending makes the whole movie up to that point, pointless. But there is another way to look at it that what happens is fairly elegant and cool.

That's where I have landed.
 
Not me.


Captain Fantastic (2016) - Enjoyed it very much. It is not nominated for Best Picture but it is in the running for my favorite movie of 2016. Viggo Mortensen is nominated for Best Actor and I don't have the slightest issue with that.

Interesting, engaging, touching story of a father with alternative ideas. Loved the ideas. Loved the kids.

8.2 out of 10

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Mudcat
Arrival (2016) - As of now (but with still some good candidates to view) this has my vote for Best Picture of 2016.

Director Denis Villeneuve has become, for me, the king of making movies that seem to be about something but are really just thrillers. Prisoners seemed for a good while to be about the philosophical question of the okayness of torture. Would you? In the most extreme conditions? But that question ended up being peripheral. Likewise Sicario seemed to be about the inherent impossibility of policing the war on drugs - and it seemed like it was going to say something deep about it - but it was really just a thriller in the end.

Nothing wrong with a good thriller and those are both decent thumbs up movies. Just not quite what they seemed to be advertising.

Arrival is a movie that seems to be about the paramount importance of clear communication - and I'm not going to say that wasn't an important part of things - but it also had a structure that reduced the importance of that in the end. Not totally though. A nice point was made. I'm avoiding spoilers and will just leave it at that.

But it's really good. Just a thoroughly thoughtful, intelligent, absorbing production. Amy Adams is truly one of the best out there. You look at this and then you remember Junebug and Enchanted ---> chick has got some ridiculous range.

8.2 out of 10


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I liked it. The "twist" was entirely too predictable but they still made it into a compelling flick.

8.3 Matty Rains out of 10 minus 0.1 for Amy Adams's weirdly puffy face

8.2 total, same as Mud-Mud

:handshake:
 
The thing for me when we get into the concept of time being one constant thing that can be viewed all at once - rather than linear as humans experience it - is free will. I say there is still free will within it. Like, from a human point of view, there was a first run-through with the normal amount of free will.

The fact that other beings might view it as one unchanging blob, doesn't change that. So when someone says everything is pointless because they should have known the future because time is one big blob that can be observed all at once (in the case of the Arrival, this would mean after she learns the language) ---> I say no.

The stuff before - and all the free will that went into it - made that learning of the language - and the final solution possible.



I don't know. What I'm saying makes sense to me. Right now. Mostly.
 
Here's something I haven't done before: give ratings just for specific performances.

Well now that I have seen all the Best Actor noms, here is the Mudcat roundup:

Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea..........9.4
Denzel Washington, Fences.........................9.2
Viggo Mortensen, Captain Fantastic..............8.5
Andrew Garfield, Hacksaw Ridge...................7.5
Ryan Gosling, La La Land............................6.8
 
Seems I have also seen all the Supporting Actress noms. My ratings:

Viola Davis, Fences......................................9.3
Michelle Williams, Manchester by the Sea.........9.1
Nicole Kidman, Lion......................................8.1
Naomie Harris, Moonlight...............................7.9
Octavia Spencer, Hidden Figures....................7.1
 
I surprised myself when I discovered I had recorded The Bourne Identity. Didn't remember programming it and my thought was, 'WTF? You are supposed to be watching critically acclaimed award nominees. The fuck you want with a bunch of car chases and choreographed fights and stupid shit?'

Goddamn it, that shit was pretty entertaining though.


:mudcat:
 
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