Tag: Robert Richardson

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: Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

A tarnished Golden State, and overripe fruit

Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) in Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) are cruisin’ for a bruisin’.

Let’s face it, we all want another Pulp Fiction. We all remember, either on opening night (me!), a bit later, or maybe way later through a TV the way we felt during, and right after, living through that unique moment in American cinema. How did Quentin Tarantino get away with gangsters talking about the Royale with cheese? Is that really John Travolta? Can we like him again? Did we just see Christopher Walken pop off a two-minute monologue about hiding family heirlooms in anal cavities? And wait, how could the middle of the story happen at the end of the film? Yep, we all remember, and let’s also face it that we’ve been waiting, WANTING another Pulp Fiction ever since. We should just stop with all that, because Tarantino’s ninth film, the excellent Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood proves, finally and triumphantly, that all the peculiar elements of his films can come together gracefully to create a dissimilar but still profoundly satisfying cinematic experience.

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Film Review: Adrift

A nice day for a sail? Not quite.

Richard (Sam Claflin) and Tami (Shailene Woodley) are adrift in the Pacific after a fierce hurricane throws them off course.

Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur is no stranger to the survival story genre; he directed 2015’s mountain-expedition-gone-bad thriller Everest, and 2012’s Icelandic-language The Deep, about a fisherman who capsizes before being rescued after six days in the water. That film probably planted the seed for Kormákur to take on Adrift, the film adaptation of Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Survival at Sea, Tami Oldham Ashcroft and Susea McGearhart’s 2002 book about the dire consequences of Hurricane Raymond on a sailing adventure undertaken by Tami and her fiancé Richard Sharp in 1983. Kormákur, working from a screenplay by twin brothers Aaron and Jordan Kandell (Moana) and David Branson Smith (Ingrid Goes West), has succeeded in creating a nerve-wracking, what-would-you-do, visceral sea faring adventure that rises to the top of a fairly crowded field.

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