An ode to Sam Rockwell

Three month and a half months later...

The moral of my blogging story seems to be that I am a semi-unreliable narrator. Life caught up to me over the past three and a half months. I moved back to DC from New York, started a new job and have been settling down in my new apartment. It seems ironic and appropriate that my previous post ended with excitement over a Sam Rockwell film and I can open this one with excitement over another.

First, I am going to rewind to the Tribeca Film Festival and tell the funny tale of how I ended up at the North American premiere of A Single Shot. When I bought my tickets, I was blissfully unaware the screening I was attending would be any different from the two others I attended earlier in that week. The first sign I was not in Kansas any more was the line around the corner. The second were the people dressed in suits compared to my casual Friday wear and finally was the entrance:

I literally walked a red carpet, and the story only gets better. In the huge auditorium, I end up sitting four rows behind David Rosenthal, Sam Rockwell, Jeffrey Wright and Kelly Reilly. Needless to say, I totally geeked out. The film itself was also excellent and I highly recommend it. An Appalachian noir with amazing story structure and acting skills throughout. Unfortunately, about the fifth question in the Q&A following the film was about gun control which wasn't even important to the narrative. I really dislike anyone's want/need to be THAT GUY.

Returning to the present, I recently saw The Way, Way Back, written by Academy Award-winning screenwriters Nat Faxon and Jim Rash. The WWB is the right balance of comedy and drama, but the best part of the film is, as I have coyly been hinting, Sam Rockwell. My favorite scene shows young Duncan on his first day at the water park. Sam plays Owen with an energy that is both maniac and infectious. The only downside to the film is Sam's energy seemed to be restrained the rest of the film and you really, really wish it wasn't.

I'll close out this post a little differently than usual, with a Sam Rockwell retrospective. A few of my favorites for your Netflix/Amazon Prime/etc. cues include Moon, Choke, Matchstick Men and I'll throw in some Charlie's Angels, just to get a little bad boy Sam Rockwell in there. Which films do you like from Sam?

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?