RAY (2004)

Directed by Taylor Hackford

Film based on true life story of legendary blues singer Ray Charles from the lose of his eyesight as a child, his rising career in the 1950s and 1960s, his encounters with racism, drug abuse, failed relationships and his ideas to change the pace music by combining soul and gospel music

Jamie Foxx gave one of the years outstanding performance as Ray Charles and deservedly won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of an exceptional man who has become an American icon.

RAY also won the Academy Awards for Best Sound Mixing and was nominated in a further 5 categories including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Film Editing and Best Costume Design

DVD Special Features:

Feature Length Commentary by director Taylor Hackford

Feature Length Extended Edition

GODS AND MONSTERS (1998)

Directed by Bill Condon

Set in 1957, James Whale (Ian Mckellan), the director of Show Boat (1936), The Invisible Man (1933), Frankenstein (1931), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), had long since stepped back from the glamor and glitz of Hollywood. A stroke triggers once buried flashes of memory of his life in Dudley, his film career, and, most influentially, the trenches during the Great War. Haunted and lonely, he recounts many of his experiences to his musclebound gardener, Clay Boone (Brendan Fraser. Despite the divide that exists between them, their friendship develops. Reliant on his sternly disapproving housemaid, Hannah (Lynn Redgrave), the flamboyant director whose time has passed sees himself slipping away, unable to stop the decline, and indulges his fantasies by coaxing Boone to model for him


Ian McKellen, in a performance that should have won him an Oscar for Best Actor (Condon did win for Best Adapted Screenplay) and the film was also nominated in the category of Best Actress for Lynn Redgrave
Ian Mckellan handles Whale with grace and humor, as a man whose love of beauty compensates for a lingering trauma, a terror of man's innate brutality. The film would be merely a showpiece however, a star turn for its lead actor, if the script did not successfully balance Whale's story with those of Clay Boone and Hannah. Brendan Fraser competently handles Boone's growing realization, like Frankenstein's monster, that he has a soul. Lynn Redgrave undergoes a remarkable transformation as the repressed Hannah, the flip-side of the hysterical housekeeper Minnie (the incomparable Una O'Connor) in Bride.

DVD Special Features:

None

GIRL, INTERRUPTED (1999)

Directed by James Mangold

Film based on writer Susanna Kaysen's (Winona Ryder) account of her 18-month stay at a mental hospital in the 1960s
Rushed to the hospital after a suicide attempt, she discusses this with a psychiatrist that she had been having some delusions. She had also been having an affair with the husband of her parents' friend. The doctor suggests that combining a bottle of aspirin and a bottle of vodka was a suicide attempt which she denies. He recommends a short period of rest at Claymoore, a private mental hospital. The girls, Georgina is a pathological liar, Polly has been badly scarred by fire, Daisy won't eat in the presence of other people and Lisa (Angelina Jolie) is a sociopath - the biggest exasperation for the staff - like Nurse Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg) and the biggest influence on the other girls in the hospital.

'Girl, Interrupted' achieves a very rare victory in modern film. It conjures enough unnerving insight to bring us scintilatingly close to its most macabre moments; while sewing atop this a spiritual safety net. One capable of the mental restoration that must bring us back to the security of our well cushioned theatre seat. All movement in between remains internal; a lingering memory of personal identification and cathartic resolution.

It is a testament to this Miss Jolie's presence that even as dark and soul sickened and gloriously decaying as her character is, there is not a frame in this film that doesn't feel her infection
One look into Angelina Jolie's eyes and you will see the warm, jaundiced decay of a soul no longer battling with sanity.

Angelina Jolie won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress having been the frontrunner throughout the season

DVD Special Features:

None

THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY (1995)

Directed by Clint Eastwood

The film is set in the summer of 1965. It tells the story of Francesca (Meryl Streep), a lonely Italian Iowa housewife. While her husband and children are away at the Illinois State Fair, she meets and falls in love with a photographer, Robert kincaid (Clint Eastwood) who has come to Madison County, Iowa to create a photographic essay for National Geographic on the covered bridges in the area. The four days they spend together are a turning point in her life and she writes of her experience in a diary which is discovered by her children after her death.

As an acting showcase, this is one of Streep's great performances. As Francesca, the woman who finds in Eastwood's photographer Robert the one great passion in her life albeit briefly and at a time when the likelihood of such a thing happening was remote indeed, Streep is extraordinary. Sometimes she can overwhelm a project; her versatility doesn't always work in favour of lesser material. But here she seems to have tapped quite effortlessly, not just into the consciousness of her character, but into her very soul as well.

Bridges earned Meryl Streep her 10th Academy Award nomination - Best Actress. She has earned 4 more to date and is the Academy's most nominated actress

DVD Special Features:

None

ABOUT SCHMIDT (2002)

Directed by Alexander Payne

Warren Schmidt is forced to deal with an ambiguous future as he enters retirement. Soon after, his wife dies and he must come to terms with his daughter's marriage to a man he does not care for and the failure that his life has become

Continuing my series on ACTING GIANTS for the anniversary of the Academy's 80th year, I have picked this film which shows that Nicholson is able to act against the usual types we have associated with him over the years. We are used to him as grinning alpha male with pointed irony and sarcasm. But in the role of Warren Schmidt, Jack successfully convinces us that a full life should be the goal instead of just living though the years. He opens our mind to the deep vacuum of a person forced to evaluate their lives by sudden events.

ABOUT SCHMIDT was nominated for 2 Academy Awards, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress

DVD Special Features:

None

AS GOOD AS IT GETS (1997)

Directed by James L. Brooks

The trials and tribulations of a compulsive writer, Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson). After his homosexual neighbor (Greg Kinnear) is brutally beaten, he is entrusted to the care of the neighbor's dog, with a difficult relationship with a waitress (Helen Hunt) to add on top of that. What develops is a weekend trip/triangle between these three individuals, and together they learn the true meaning of "the sunny side of life".

Nominated for 7 Academy Awards, Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Comedy Score and Best Film Editing

Won, 2, Best Actor and Best Actress making it one of only 5 films to have accomplished this in the Academy's history

The others were:

IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934)
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (1975)
ON GOLDEN POND (1980)
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

DVD Special Features:

None