Just think: those poor, carefully cultivated flowers would’ve had no screen time at all if this had been shot as a made-for-TV movie.
My wife and I were impressed by the first two seasons of Veronica Mars and jilted into a mutual depression spiral by season three. When creator/writer/director Rob Thomas launched the famous Kickstarter project to bring back the infamous detective for an unlikely feature film, I had mixed emotions. Surprise that yet another well-written but mercilessly treated series was taking the Firefly route to a post-cancellation revival. Disappointment that the campaign occurred during my still-in-effect Kickstarter moratorium and would therefore receive no pre-production dollars from me, through no fault of its own. Good cheer when the campaign succeeded without me. Skepticism at some of the clunky lines in the trailer. A tinge of geek entitlement because someone still owed me reparations for season three.
Unlike five other Kickstarter campaigns that have yet to keep their promises to me, the Veronica Mars project has borne fruit within a month of its original stated deadline, resulting in a finished product that opened in nearly 300 theaters this past weekend and is simultaneously available for rental via Google Play. At last the lingering question was answered: did anything positive ever happen in Veronica’s life again after that dreary series finale?
Alexander Payne’s new film Nebraska perfectly replicates that forlorn Midwest sensation of being trapped in rooms with hordes of impressionable, elderly relatives all living on the same slow-motion wavelength, visiting and reminiscing and comparing their amnesia levels and enjoying life’s remaining minutes at the speed of molasses, except when they’re jumping to conclusions at hyperspeed. When that happens to me, I put on a brave front while suppressing the desperate urge to crawl out of my skin. With SNL’s Will Forte acting as my proxy and reenacting my childhood family vacations so vividly, I’m surprised I didn’t convulse in my seat with flashbacks.
Older fans of Matthew McConaughey’s spate of ’90s romantic comedies may be in for a shock when they walk into Dallas Buyers Club and see him playing Christian Bale’s character from The Machinist. He and costar Jared Leto (both radically transformed and up for Oscars this year) underwent severe weight loss for their roles in this based-on-a-true-story underdog drama that’s one part can’t-we-all-just-get-along and four parts sticking-it-to-The-MAN.
If you’re online much, you’re already aware this year’s Academy Awards nominations were announced today. If you follow either The Hollywood Reporter or The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences on Twitter, you had the opportunity to see the categories live-tweeted one at a time early this morning. If you shared my mistake of following both entities, you were treated to a double-barrel Oscar-nom redundancy blast that turned Twitter to sludge for fifteen minutes. Homework question: how many live-tweeters does any given event really need?
