So it’s been about three weeks since my theater experience, and it’s time for another jaunt into unimportant land of movie reviews.
This time it’s the Will Smith Oscar vehicle The Pursuit of Happyness. Yes, it’s spelled correctly. You know what it is from seeing the trailer. A fatherly tale of triumph in the face of tall odds. And it delivers just that. No surprises…
While I felt the performances were strong, I think I saw too much pre-release material (I did catch some of the Oprah episode with both Smith and the real person his character is based on while decorating the xmas tree last year). Therefore it wasn’t nearly as powerful as if I went into seeing the movie completely blind. I give it a weak 6 of 10. It’s stronger than all other 5′s I’ve seen this year, but the weakest 6.
Now for the whole Oscar thing… I personally think Smith has two competitors in this category – Ryan Gosling (in Half Nelson) and Forest Whitaker (in The Last King of Scotland). Sure, DiCaprio is a dark horse of sorts, but it’ll really come down to either Whitaker or Smith in my opinion. I hope that Whitaker wins because showing an emotional performance as Smith does in Happyness nothing like playing such a demanding role as Idi Amin in terms of emotion and the irrational nature of playing a delusional dictator. But I really won’t be that surprised if any of the actors nominated win. And even though I’m not a huge Sacha Baron Cohen fan, I think the ask of acting in a relatively unscripted film in his manner is a larger feat of acting excellence than any of the nominated actors. I’m not that excited about the Oscars this year. I may have to write a small post about the fact that the relatively normal incidence of nominating children (that girl from Little Miss Sunshine) should either end or there should be a child category. When I’m most interested to see who wins best documentary (An Inconvenient Truth!), then it’s not a great Oscar year.