Posts Tagged ‘denzel washington’

The Academy Awards separates its acting categories by sex and screen time. The Golden Globes goes as far as to separate them by genre. I say screw that. Here are the 20 best performances of 2012, regardless of sex, genre or species.

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Morality, heroism and addiction come to a head in Flight, the director’s first live-action film in over a decade and, not so coincidentally, his first good movie since 2000′s Cast Away. The drama, which features great performances by Denzel Washington and Kelly Reilly, is not a complete return to form, but I’ll take it.

Read our full Flight movie review.

Is Robert Zemeckis finally back? The evil spirit that took control of the Back to the Future director for the last decade has apparently been vanquished, at least temporarily, for Zemeckis’ first non-motion capture movie since 2000′s Cast Away arrives this November in the form of Flight, a serious drama about a plane crash and starring Denzel Washington.

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It’s been nearly ten years since we last heard from the Hughes brothers, but they’re back with the religiously themed apocalyptic action-thriller The Book of Eli, starring Denzel Washington. The movie looks great and features yet another good performance from the A-list actor, but the movie gets bogged down by its lack of a strong plot.

Read FilmJabber’s full The Book of Eli movie review.

Columbia Pictures has released a new movie trailer for the upcoming Tony Scott film, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, which stars Denzel Washington and John Travolta. The movie doesn’t really feel like an event film, but this new movie trailer makes large gains. The first trailer was OK but a little cluttered; this new one emphasizes the action and the basic premise with improved focus.

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Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters arrives on DVD on May 13th in a two-disc collector’s edition, which, coincidentally enough, recently arrived in my mailbox. I’m pretty sure Bob and Harvey Weinstein personally wanted me to review this DVD.

The movie itself was pretty good, despite looking like a dozen other inspirational teacher stories. With good acting from the young cast, as well as Denzel and Forest Whitaker (how often do you get to see those two together?), The Great Debaters entertains and educates simultaneously. While you can tell plenty of elements are dramatized for the sake of storytelling, Denzel does a good job of diving into the era and setting, depicting racism, relationships and family in a very authentic way. The Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture was a bit overkill, but The Great Debaters was one of the better movies of 2007. You can read my full Great Debaters movie review here.

Thankfully, The Weinstein Co. has given The Great Debaters pretty good DVD treatment. There are enough special features that some are actually included on the first disc; usually, bonus features are relegated solely to the second. Anyway, the DVD offers a wide array of featurettes that examine various aspects of the production, from the historical relevance to the score, costume design, production design and more. All of the featurettes are interesting in their own right, and thankfully are just the right length; they aren’t promotional and they aren’t ridiculously long, either. Several feature interviews with living people who are portrayed in the film.

The best of the featurettes is a behind-the-scenes look at debate camp. Apparently, Denzel wanted his actors to be authentic in the art of debate, so he stuck them all into a real debate class. The featurette is fun because you get to see the actors out of their element, getting critiqued and so on and so forth.

Other special features include an examination of Forest Whitaker (which contains a lot of, “Oh, Forest is so great!” remarks), some deleted scenes and a couple of music videos.

If you like behind-the-scenes videos, The Great Debaters provides some pretty good insight into the production of the film. It doesn’t given you director’s commentary, strangely enough, but if you want to get the low down on the film without spending several hours of your time, this one is definitely a worthy purchase.

I actually watched American Gangster over a week ago, but due to mitigating circumstances (changing day jobs, trying to get a date with this one young woman, traveling to Florida for a weekend and so on and so forth), I forgot about (a.k.a. put off) writing a movie review for the picture.

Interestingly enough, I had just watched Mr. Untouchable, a documentary that interviews Nicky Barnes, one of the drug kingpins depicted in the picture (played by Cuba Gooding, Jr.). American Gangster isn’t about Nicky Barnes, but it is about another drug kingpin who gained tremendous power a few decades ago but who thanks to a dedicated cop finally had his empire destroyed. American Gangster is about two men, the cop (Russell Crowe) and the gangster (Denzel Washington), who square off, even though they rarely share a scene together or even know the other one exists.

Director Ridley Scott has once delivered a solid picture, and some critics are suggesting early Oscar buzz. While I would say that there have been better movies this year, American Gangster has the stars, the dazzle and the box office success to be a serious contender. Hear what I have to say by reading my full American Gangster movie review.