The statues are all distributed, the corks are all popped, and now it is time to talk about the 82nd Academy Awards in the past tense. We’ll get to who won, but first off I’d like to talk about who lost: the viewing audience. This has to be one of the worst awards broadcasts in recent memory. Overlong and underwhelming, the only thing interesting in the show was actually finding out who won, which is weird because that often takes a backseat to the rest of the spectacle.

Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were charming, albeit neutered, hosts. They farmed the opening number out to Neil Patrick Harris, which was predictably fine, but it seemed like a complete redux of his bouts as Tony and Emmy host. On paper it sounds poignant, but in practice it felt stale. I long for the days when Billy Crystal would superimpose himself into the top nominated films. I can understand the new hosts wanting to move forward with an original spin, only this felt like a step backwards. Read on...

Cop Out confirms that Kevin Smith is a brilliant writer but a mediocre director. There are plenty of belly laughs in this wayward film, but the plot trickles out too slowly with an antagonist that is hardly worth the time. Tracy Morgan’s comic muscle flexes wildly, and Bruce Willis is delightful as the deadbeat straight man, so the laughs abound. When you’re not laughing, however, you’ll probably be looking around the theater wondering why everyone slapped down the price of popcorn in the first place.

Artistically, the film aims for Beverly Hills Cop but falls closer to Dragnet. The real problem is our bad guy, Poh Boy, a Mexican drug lord with a penchant for pricey sports memorobilia. His “tweak”, if you will, is that he speaks like Baby Huey and is named after a sandwich. Otherwise, he’s just a drug dealer like any other: heavily armed and cocksure. I’ll get to our ludicrous heroes in a moment, but I need to stress that this movie could have been saved with a better baddie. The jokes flow like beer at a bachelor party but nothing holds them together. There is no reason not to clip this movie up into a couple of YouTube replays. Read on...

Lee Daniels’ Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire is difficult to talk about, let alone sit through. Part memoir, part fantasy and part social deconstruction, the film deals in a grab bag of hot button social mores: poverty, racism, rape, incest, epidemics and education reform to name only a few. The director is literally playing with fire, yet, somehow, he has managed to make a feel-good movie. You heard me right.

Clarice Precious Jones lives in Harlem with her abusive mother. The year is 1987 and she is pregnant with her second child by her father. At 16, Precious is still in junior high school, until her pro-active principal recommends her for an alternative schooling program called Each One Teach One. It is here, with the help of a self-assured teacher and a hood-bred cadre of girls, that her journey of self-discovery begins. What does she discover? The same thing we know about ten minutes into the film: that her mother is a big ol’ B-word. Read on...

Early in Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart, we see Bad Blake, the middle aged country music star played by Jeff Bridges, doubled over a trash can puking his guts up. It is heartbreaking, until Blake reaches into the void to retrieve his sunglasses, wiping the mucus off as he picks them up. In a manner that only Mr. Bridges can conjure up, the move comes off as charming, witty almost. Bad Blake is a drunk in need of a wakeup call. but if not for the brilliant nuance Bridges brings to the role Crazy Heart would be an after school special, shown at SADD meetings across the country to keep kids off the bottle. Read on...

The candler blog was born in March of 2009. In the past year, we’ve written a whole lot about cinema, and I’m proud to say we’ve covered most of the top 2010 Oscar contenders on these pages. We even had a strong opinion back when AMPAS upped the number of Best Picture nominations to 10. There are still some holes and we’ll fix that soon. For now, catch up on our thoughts on the year’s biggest films and share your what you think in the comments. Read on...

Overstylized, overdramatic and overcooked are all understatements when describing Albert and Allen Hughes’ The Book of Eli. The only facet of it I can speak highly of is Gary Oldman, who finally returns to the baddie throne he built so long ago. Otherwise, the film is just an exercise in technological possibilities on the part of the directors and their team. We come along for their ride.

Let’s start with the visuals, which is clearly where The Hughes Brothers devoted most of their efforts. Taking a page out of the Sin City and 300 playbooks, the film is mostly greenscreened footage over a hyper-realistic backdrop. It’s a style, no doubt, but one that is more grating than it is interesting in this instance. Shot on the RED camera, foreground imagery seems to break apart very quickly, at least on the print I saw. I don’t care how many “K”s they put in the resolution, it really did not mix well with the synthesized backgrounds. Besides that, this steampunk-chic post-apocalypse is nothing new to audiences. So what do the Hughes Brothers bring to the table that maybe we haven’t seen before? God! Read on...

Fetishism is the first word that comes to mind when considering Rob Marshall’s newest musical film, Nine. Take your pick of which element is fetishized: Europe, the 1960s, cinema, Penélope Cruz, etc. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s actually quite an accurate read of how we now view the work of Federico Fellini and his peers. The filmmaker, on whose 8 ½ the 1982 musical, and by proxy this film, is based is known not only for his mastery of film language but for his keen eye for style. Of course, Fellini’s film was not a musical, but a backstage circus in the life of a woebegone director. Converting it to a stage musical must have been daunting enough, but bringing it back to the screen is something of a chore.

Daniel Day-Lewis is Guido Contini, the Italian director whose next film is sold as being his return to his glory days. The problem is that he hasn’t written it yet, and from the outset we learn he begins shooting in ten days. He is also a womanizer, haunted by the dream versions of the real women in his life. Though he is surrounded by men, it is the women who serves as his muses, for better or worse. Day-Lewis brings not only his uncanny abilities of vocal interpretation but also an incredible physicality to the Italian auteur. Gliding across the screen, he feels ten feet tall atop legs made of feathers. Sure, he’s no Fred Astaire, but if someone asked him to he could probably pull that off too. Read on...

In case your great aunt’s fruitcake wasn’t stale enough this holiday season (as stale as fruitcake jokes, perhaps?), head to the theater where you can get an eyeful of the same-old-same-old in Guy Ritchie’s unbearably boring Sherlock Holmes. The title character, a literary invention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of the few who is yet to find a modern home on the silver screen as the decade of franchises comes to a close. Having seen Superman, Spiderman, James Bond and the Star Trek crew get a bigscreen reboot in the aughts, the next ten years will be dominated by bottom of the barrel heroes who have had a cultural (read: box office) impact in other generations. So before you line up in 2010 for Clash of the Titans, enter the good inspector Holmes and his devoted sidekick, Dr. Watson.

Though most fans will agree that the cadaverous Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of the master sleuth is the truest, it is difficult to deny that Robert Downey Jr. is more than adequately equipped to carry the torch. He certainly throws the kitchen sink at the role, though there isn’t much for the gifted thesp to work with. Penned by Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg, this iteration of the Londoner gumshoe has little more than pecks to hang his hat on. Trained with the precision of a Kung Fu master, Holmes’ newfound brutish strenghth may be the result of deductive reasoning, but he is a brute nonetheless. Planting blows where words fail him, this Holmes is more a man of action than any that came before him, which wouldn’t be such a bad thing if his intellect didn’t feel like such an afterthought. Read on...