Saying goodbye to a legend

I slowly crawl my way back to movie-dom with a few very important happenings over the past few weeks helping me. First, I would be quite remiss as a film/pop culture fanatic if I did not mention the passing of film critic, Roger Ebert. While most great writers of his generation would have been overwhelmed by the social world, Ebert welcomed both the long and short forms with undeniable enthusiasm. In his last year, Ebert wrote 306 reviews at the Chicago Sun-Times, the most in his career, still ran his annual Ebertfest at the University of Illinois and filmed a bio-documentary about his life. I think Mia Farrow said it best this past week when she said on Twitter, "If cancer came to take me piece by piece, I hope I could summon even a fraction of the grace Roger Ebert showed us, in such abundance." If you are interested in reading more about his life and love of film, I highly suggest you read his memoir Life Itself.

Transitioning to Oscar-land, the Academy set the date for next year's ceremony, March 2nd. "Quite late!" you say. What an astute reader, you are! Due to the 2014 Winter Olympics, the Academy pushed back both the ceremony and nominations, to be announced on January 16th. This means 45 days of movie watching between nominations and ceremony, or one whole extra week. Does this make you super excited for January?! Me too!

In the meantime, it's festival season! More exclamation points!! Those of you in the NYC area would know this, but for those who do not, today marks the first day of the Tribeca Film Festival! I cannot express how excited, ecstatic and any other enthusiastic adjective you can fathom. I bought tickets to three different movies, three different nights at the end of next week. The first is Teenage, a documentary about the rise of teenage culture, with my now infamous blog reference, Kerry. The second is The Pretty One, a narrative fiction piece about a young woman who takes on her twin sister's personality after her death, with Stephanie, and the final is A Single Shot, another narrative fiction about a hunter who accidentally shoots a woman and the consequences when he tries to cover it up, by my lonesome. If Telluride Film Fest taught me anything, though, it was how to make friends while standing in film festival lines. I promise, fo' realz this time, to follow up this post on the weekend immediately following to give you my opinions on the films and overall scene at Tribeca.

Now, I bid you adieu with the usual fun: two versions of Hey Ho - the first from Jimmy Fallon with Nick Offerman, Blake Shelton and a random fourth person and the second by Lennon and Maisy Stella, the two little girls from Nashville. Bonus: check out their version of "Call Your Girlfriend." Not sure how I didn't know about this, but one of my favorite novels was adapted last year into an addictive web series called "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries", thank you PCHH! And finally, an obligatory Buzzfeed.

Update: Cannes Film Fest announced their lineup for 2013, including the 19 contenders for the Palme d'Or. I'm excited to hear reactions to the new Coen Brothers' film Inside Llewyn Davis and Iran's Asghar Farhadi's new film The Past. What do you think of the lineup, loyal readers?

"Flat? Just as God made me."

For the past few weeks/month, I've been going through a massive film detox. After so many movies, over so short a period of time, I needed a change of pace or should I say medium. At the suggestion of my coworker Sara, I tried out podcasts. I have to admit, I was skeptical at first. Listening to people talk sounded terribly boring and it can be if you don't find the great ones. Case and point: NPR's "Pop Culture Happy Hour", roundtable discussion on books, movies, television and obviously, whatever fabulous moment is happening in pop culture. The four main hosts have great chemistry and the producers do wonders in editing which make the show flow well and endlessly entertaining. The opposite is true, I am sad to say, for Entertainment Weekly's "Entertainment Geekly".

I've also gone through my detox by watching more television, made easy by the yearly tradition of studios dumping their horrible/unmarketable films into the month of March. I've started on old episodes of The West Wing, encouraged by both Netflix and my friend Kerry. Kerry has also pushed me to start on Friday Night Lights, not a hard sell given my love for Connie Britton. Then the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign happened.

Let me start my analysis by saying this: I am a massive fan of the show and am, in fact, one of over 64,000 contributors to the campaign. My first reaction to the campaign, utter glee. What could be better than having the power to help bring one of my favorite television shows and characters back? Then I kept hearing more about how other shows could do this: Firefly? Freaks and Geeks? While I wouldn't exactly be opposed to Freaks, what worries me most is that this will now be what studios expect. On top of $12 per ticket, am I now paying to produce the movie as well? Sure, having the power to choose is spectacular but at the same time, I eloquently add, what the hell? And what about decreasing potential for fresh ideas? Not the ones reproduced from previous decades or fairy tales, I'm looking directly at you, Jack the Giant Slayer.

The Veronica Mars model also calls into question, as many have posited over the past few weeks, where Rob Thomas' dedication to the fan-base will lead the film. Does that really matter? Should it matter? Will there be legal ramifications if the film does not please fans? Only 2014 can tell.

To close out my post/unanswered questions on VM, I'll leave you as always with a little Buzzfeed love, a little retrospective on The Real World from Vulture and something to make you sob giant tears for the end of good taste. To be fair, I should have most likely given up when they greenlit The Expendables 3.