CineNiche

April 19, 2021 - April 25, 2021 Hello readers. The big night has come and gone. 41 features and 15 short films competed for an eight-pound statuette. We did not complete the so-called Oscar death race. We finished at 26 features and 11 shorts, that's a 66% overall grade. We just got fatigued. Once you see all the contenders for best film, actor, actress, supporting actor, supporting actress, director, adapted screenplay, original screenplay, editing, and throw in a couple shorts, you feel confident going into Oscar night. But no one was ready for what happened, or were they?  I knew Nomadland would win best picture, it has won across the board. The same can be said for Chloé Zhao winning best director. Which, can you believe this is only the second time a woman has won a director award? But the upsets came first when Sound of Metal won best film editing an award that should have clearly been the only award for The Father . But The Father won best adapted screenplay which should...

This film has us stumped, not in the sense that we don’t have any theories on its ending, but in the way that the experience was so perfect it has left us with writers block. The film begins with Aoyama’s wife dying and his seven long years of loneliness.   This leads him to need to remarry – “men can’t maintain without female support.”   He and his friend Yoshikawa set up a fake film audition for a project called “Tomorrow’s Heroine.”   Asami is one of the applicants and through spilt coffee Aoyama is completely smitten.   The titular event is creative in the way it is edited – a montage of mixed questions and answers (i.e. have you ever been involved with the adult film industry? This is the scar from my first suicide).   The only straight forward audition is Asami’s.   Over the course of what seems like weeks the two finally stay the night together in what we consider the biggest scare within the film – commitment.   It ends badly, full of regret. ...

Prior to Milos Forman's groundbreaking adaptation of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST , he made a wonderfully radical film called TAKING OFF which featured extreme hippy overtones. This film has never received a wide DVD release and thus is holy grail to find. I viewed a VHS of it recently and it still lives up to what it was in 1971. The basic plot is simple: a married couple Lynn and Larry Tyne cope with their runaway daughter. What makes this so interesting is how they cope. The Tynes' have decided that their daughter shouldn't be the only one having fun and seize the opportunity to relinquish their parenting duties to dance, drink, smoke pot, gamble, and be merry. Among the twenty films in Forman's repartee, the Czech born director has achieved international acclaim with only a select few. First with FIREMAN'S BALL (1967), then ONE FLEW... (1975), AMADEUS (1984), and finally MAN ON THE MOON (1999). Each one with its own independent theme and feel. ...