Mama

“Mama”, produced by Guillermo del Toro and starring Jessica Chastain and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, has a unique, captivating high concept for a horror movie. When two young girls are abandoned in a cabin in the woods, they’re raised by a ghost, who becomes protective of them, following them even after they’re found and reintegrated into society.

For quite a significant portion of its runtime, “Mama” had me pretty absorbed into the story, and even provided a couple of decent startle moments along the way.

Unfortunately, I have to take the entire movie into consideration here, and at the very end, “Mama” flies right off the rails.

The 2012 FMR MAJOR Awards: The Best Actress Winner

Alright everyone… Our final acting MAJOR Award of 2012, the Leg Lamp for Best Actress. The actress in a leading role who submitted the best performance of the year!

The nominees are: Jessica Chastain, “Zero Dark Thirty”, Jennifer Lawrence, “Silver Linings Playbook”, Helen Mirren, “Hitchcock”, Quvenzhané Wallis, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”, and Naomi Watts, “The Impossible”.

Click through to see which of these phenomenal actresses takes the title!

The 2012 FMR MAJOR Awards: The Best Actress Nominees

Drum roll please. I proudly present to you the Best Actress Nominees for the 2012 MAJOR Awards! These are the five actresses who made the biggest impression in a starring role this year!

Click through to see who the nominees are!

The 2013 Winter Movie Season Preview

Ok, boys and girls. The Holiday Season is over… and the Spring Season, full of mini Blockbusters, is still months away.

Between now and then lies Hollywood’s dumping ground. The Hollywood fields lie fallow in the winter, bearing little quality product. It’s the two months of the year we need to “Get through”. While January typically offers some limited releases from the prior year going wide, there’s typically little else to get excited over.

Will this year be different? Are there any movies to get excited about these next two months? Let’s take a look at the release slate and see what we’ve got!

Lawless

In the hills of Franklin County, Virginia during Prohibition, a trio of brothers distill moonshine in the woods and smuggle it into the big city and sell it to organized crime. When a new special deputy is appointed for the area, things begin to get heated. Violence and drama ensue as the brothers struggle against the law and try to romance the ladies, all in the course of trying to build their white lightning empire.

It’s a pretty basic story, but all of the performers do a pretty admirable job, and the combination of period piece and gangster element is always a plus in my book. “Lawless” is no threat to make my Top Ten this year, by any means, but it did wind up a surprisingly entertaining time at the movies for me.

The 2012 Fall Movie Preview – Part I

With this weekend’s release of “The Expendables 2” and “ParaNorman”, the summer movie season is pretty much over. One weekend remains in August, and those movies wont have much room to run before school is back in session.

Nope, the season of the big blockbuster is behind us. It’s time to look ahead to the fall.

Not to despair, though, the fall brings sharp movies for the thinking movie fan. Movies which may have more selective box office appeal, but which may be some of the best movies all year.

So click through to take a look at the first part of this year’s fall preview. Today we’ll look at the last week of August, plus September, and then we’ll come back tomorrow with October and the first week of November. Together they’ll take us right up to the start of the Holiday movie season, and the November 9th release of Skyfall!

Under the Radar?: “Take Shelter”

Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head.

But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red!

Cryin’s not for me, no.

Cause I’m gonna quit my job and take out a home loa–

Oh sorry.

“Take Shelter” is a psychological drama from last year, starring Michael Shannon as a man who begins to have extremely graphic nightmares about catastrophic storms. The dreams are severe enough that they begin to encroach on his daily life… affecting his relationship with his wife and child, his performance on his job, and leading him to question his own sanity.

It’s a harrowing movie, driven by an intense lead performance, and definitely worth your time to check out.

Now Showing on Cable: “The Debt”

Premiering this weekend on Cinemax was last year’s espionage thriller, “The Debt”.

Starring Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Ciarán Hinds, Sam Worthington and Jessica Chastain, “The Debt” is the story of three Mossad agents dealing with the consequences of a key operation from their younger days. A portion of the narrative set in current day is intercut with flashbacks of a mission the trio undertook in East Germany in the mid 1960s.

The three were charged with getting their hands on a Nazi doctor, “The Surgeon of Birkenau”, who performed biological experiments on humans during WWII and returning him to Israel for trial.

Things did not go as planned.

Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted

“Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted” continues the adventures of Alex the Lion (Ben Stiller), Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the Giraffe (David Schwimmer), and Gloria the Hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) as they try to return to New York and the zoo that they once called home. They’re able to make their way from Africa to Monte Carlo, but from there, intend to seek out the help of the penguins in order to cross the Atlantic and return to the United States. Of course, things don’t go as planned, and the animals wind up having to take cover from an animal control officer in a traveling circus.

It’s got plenty of comedy and some fun actions sequences, but the bright colors and happy characters can’t disguise the fact that there isn’t a lot under the hood.

Fogs’ Oscar Diary: Pt 1 The Red Carpet

Overture, curtain, lights!
This is it. The night of nights.
No more rehearsing or nursing a part.
We know every part by heart!

Overture, curtain, lights!
This is it. We’ll hit the heights!
And oh, what heights we’ll hit!
On with the show, this is it!

Ok, here we go folks. I honestly don’t watch the actual Oscar ceremony often, and when I have it’s always been kind of a sporadic thing, clicking through, waiting for the big awards. I’ve never watched an entire show, never seen the red carpet pre show… Seeing as I’m blogging now though, I figure I’ll keep a running diary so if anyone wants to snark along they can! I’m going to try to post once an hour, or as closely thereto, where breaks and such make sense.

Bear with me through typos and whatnot, there won’t be time to edit.

Ok? Hope it works.