Introducing `Film Nerd’

Eight more movies before Oscar night

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Morning Update

Sunday, April 18, 2021

By Ken Tingley

From the fifth row of an empty movie theater in Saratoga Springs Saturday night I got a text informing me that I had become a “film nerd.”

That text came from my wife who had passed up accompanying me to the empty theater.

I’ve always loved the movies and religiously made an effort to see as many of the Academy Award nominated films as possible before Oscar night.

Last year, I saw all the nominees in the major acting categories and all the best picture films. This year, I’m attempting the grand slam of movie watching. I’m attempting to see every movie nominated in every major category - sound, visual effects, documentary, animated and international, everything.

With eight days to go before the Oscar ceremony on April 25, I need to watch eight movies in eight days and four animated shorts - if I can find them.

I started my day by watching a Sophia Loren film - The Life Ahead - that has a nomination for best song. What I found out in watching the entire movie - the nominated song plays over the closing credits - was that Sophia Loren can still act at age 86 and it was a pretty darn good movie.  After watching Loren yesterday, I thought her performance is better than any of the five actresses nominated this year.

Twice I’ve been to Saratoga Springs this week for a five-movie shorts marathon. On Thursday I saw the Best documentary (short subjects) and then Saturday night I saw the five films nominated for Best Short Film (Live Action). I shared the theater with one other person Saturday.

Here’s the thing, I’d rate four of those short films as better than any feature length film I’ve seen this year. They were clever, timely and had emotional clout.

The reality is that most of us who complain about how the feature length movies aren’t any good anymore are just looking in the wrong places. Streaming services - and our reluctance to go to the multiplex during the pandemic - have been to he great equalizers.

Forcing myself to watch all the nominees is like panning for gold, and I’ve found a bunch of gold nuggets this week.

I’ve already written about the documentary “My Octopus Teacher,” which is hands down the best thing I’ve seen during this marathon journey.

Granted, I’m a sucker for documentaries - it’s the journalism background - and the movie “Collective” fills the bill as a journalism movie right up there with “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight,” if you can handle reading the Romanian subtitles. But “Crip Camp” and “The Mole Agent” were great, too.

When you force yourself into watching different categories - animated for instance - you stumble onto gems like “Soul,” “Over the Moon,” “Wolfwalkers,” and even “Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon.” If you’ve had a tough day at work, you won’t be disappointed by any of them. And there isn’t even any dialog in “Shaun the Sheep Movie.”

We gook a flyer on “Love and Monsters” because of its nomination for best visual effects and were not disappointed by the monsters or the romance.

The big movies have been relatively average this year, but if you look beneath the surface there is plenty of entertainment to be had and I’ve still got eight more movies to watch this week.

It can be pretty lonely when you are film nerd,

Happy birthday dad

My dad would have been 89 today. He’s been gone almost 20 years now, but I still think about him and what he has missed.

Tweet of the Day

Paul W. Gillespie @pwgphoto

Five yrs ago I was leaving The Capital office at 888 Bestgate. I saw this giant moon with airplanes flying past. A shot I was trying and still try for all the time. I've never been able to catch the plane this big, especially at night, because I want a silhouette. One day.