Movie Blog: This Week's Best Bets
With the Academy Awards still looming large on the horizon, it's hard not to post up a handful of nominees again this week.
A few of the big contenders -- such as Birdman, Selma, Boyhood and American Sniper – are showing at several metro screens, and the Oscar-nominated shorts are also still going strong over at the Lagoon and the Riverview.
But not everything worth watching this week is connected to award shows. For instance, there's a horror flick about killing Nazi zombies fresh on Netflix, and de Palma's Blow Out.
And, of course, there are some films (Oscar stuff included) that could perhaps serve some Valentine's week purposes.
Tuesday, Feb. 10: Blow Out (Trylon Microcinema)
While perhaps not a beloved De Palma work, Blow Out was made when the director was at the top of his game. Taking from Antonioni's amazing Blow-Up, in which a photographer becomes obsessed when he thinks he spots a dead body in one of his photos, De Palma has John Travolta play a B-movie sound engineer who thinks he records the possible murder of a presidential candidate. The plot grows beautifully more complicated from there, and De Palma enriches the experience continually with an incredible amount of playful ideas and cinematic tricks. To his great credit, he isn't afraid to challenge his audience.
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Wednesday, Feb. 11: Leviathan (Edina Cinema)
Alright, I haven't seen this movie, so I can't speak from experience here. However, that doesn't mean this beast isn't worth consideration. It's the Russian entry for best foreign film Oscar, and everything I've read on it has me more than excited to see it. The story centers on the battle between a man and his local bureaucracy, which seeks to seize his home. While that seems pretty black-and-white as far as good guys and bad guys go, the characters here are supposed to be opaque and morally ambiguous. Meanwhile, the landscapes of the Barents Sea are full of blue-gray, unforgettable beauty.
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New On Netflix: Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead
It's supposed to snow Wednesday, so why not stay in and stream this monstrosity. It's the sequel to the Norwegian film Dead Snow, which followed a group of vacationers as they try to survive an onslaught of Nazi zombies. While Call of Duty fans might think they're familiar with these henchmen, it turns out you just can't shoot your way through the monsters of the Third Reich. Instead, you've got to understand ritual zombie magic and summon the undead of the Red Army. In the end, it's a zombie vs. zombie showdown, with loads of gratuitous, goofy gore.
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