Film Feature: Carrie and Chris Pick the 2020 Oscars

Film critics Carrie and Chris on who will – and who should – win the 92nd Academy Awards

The 92nd Academy Awards air tomorrow, Sunday, February 9th, on ABC at 5:00 pm PST. Once again, Spinning Platters film critics Carrie Kahn and Chris Piper share their predictions — and hopes — for the major categories. A lot of the winners feel like locks, based on earlier award season wins, but, honestly, we’d rather have some upsets to make for an interesting show then have all our predictions come true. Fingers crossed for some liveliness!

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Film Review: Life Itself

Your life itself deserves better than this trite, facile disaster

Abby (Olivia Wilde) and Will (Oscar Isaac) are so very much in love. Too bad they’re in a Dan Fogelman drama.

I’m trying to come up with one kind thing to say about Life Itself, the new movie from writer/director Dan Fogelman, creator of television’s weep-inducing phenom This is Us, and all I can come up with is, boy, Oscar Isaac sure is nice to look at. When one of the film’s characters proclaims outright, “This is some deep philosophical shit,” you know you’re in trouble. Fogelman commits the cardinal screenwriting sin of telling (and over and over and over, mind you) rather than showing, and the result is a cringe-inducing, treacly, overwrought mess of a picture that even This is Us fans will do well to avoid.

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Film Review: “Haywire”

Gina Carano and Michael Fassbender in HAYWIRE

starring: Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Bill Paxton, Michael Angarano

written by: Lem Dobbs

directed by: Steven Soderbergh

MPAA: Rated R for some violence

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Spinning Platters Interview: Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek on “Puss in Boots” (and “The Skin I Live In”)

Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek at the San Francisco premiere of PUSS IN BOOTS. Photo by Eric Lawson.

Antonio Banderas is out on a very polarized and complicated press tour at the moment. While it is not uncommon for an actor to have several projects opening at the same time, there have perhaps never been two more diametrically opposed films opening together than Puss in Boots, a feature-length spinoff of Banderas’ scene-stealing feline fan favorite from the Shrek films, and The Skin I Live In, a shockingly perverse psychological drama that reunites Banderas, now 51, with the great Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar, who first introduced Banderas in such ’80s world cinema classics as Law of Desire and Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown. And so, when Banderas and his frequent collaborator/Puss in Boots co-star Salma Hayek came to San Francisco for a red carpet premiere of their film, we were supposed to be talking about the family-friendly Puss in Boots. But, inevitably, the conversation kept working its way back to his other, considerably more lurid project – whether he liked it or not.

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