Reviews of albums, films, concerts, and more from the Bay Area Music and Movie Nerds
Spinning Platters Film Editor Carrie Kahn shares her ten favorite films of 2017, presented in descending rank order. You can also check out her list from last year here.
Continue reading “Film Feature: Carrie’s Top 10 Films of 2017”
“We can’t have the administration dictate our coverage just because they don’t like what we printed about them in the newspaper,” Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) tells Post owner and publisher Kay Graham (Meryl Streep) in director Steven Spielberg’s fine new film The Post. A paean to journalism that is still exceedingly relevant today, Spielberg’s story of the Post’s battle to publish the confidential Pentagon Papers in the early 1970s succeeds on a number of levels, making it one of the best pictures of the year, and giving it a rightful place in the canon of great journalism movies.
The 38th Mill Valley Film Festival closed Sunday, October 18th, but if you weren’t able to make it out to Marin these past ten days, never fear: many of the titles – both big and small – will be widely released, and available to you soon at your local theater. To wrap up our coverage, Spinning Platters takes a look at three of these films, one of which actually opens this Friday.
Continue reading “MVFF38 Spotlights #2: Truth/Yosemite/Suffragette”
The 87th Academy Awards air this Sunday, February 22nd on ABC at 5:00pm PST (red carpet coverage begins at 4:00, if you want to dish on fashion highs and lows). There are some tight races this year – Best Picture and Best Actor are especially hard to call. Here are Carrie and Chad’s predictions – and hopes – for the major categories:
Continue reading “Film Feature: Carrie and Chad Pick the Oscars”
Director Rob Marshall, who was nominated for an Oscar for his film version of the musical “Chicago” back in 2003, returns this holiday season with another big screen adaptation of a Broadway hit musical. This time he takes on Steven Sondheim’s storied (pun intended) 1987 mega-hit Into the Woods, an extraordinarily entertaining mishmash of several of the Grimm Brothers classic fairy tales. Produced by Disney, the film had been the subject of widespread speculation that the darker edges of the Sondheim/James Lapine fantasy might be smoothed too much. Purists need not worry, however; Marshall’s version retains the mature themes and disquieting tone of the original, and has the added benefit of a terrific cast.
starring: Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Steve Carell
written by: Vanessa Taylor
directed by: David Frankel
MPAA: Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content involving sexuality
starring: Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent, Alexandra Roach, Olivia Colman, Harry Lloyd, Richard E. Grant, Anthony Head
written by: Abi Morgan
directed by: Phyllida Lloyd
MPAA: Rated PG-13 for some violent images and brief nudity