127 Hours Review

In honor of the Oscars, I'm going to try and review all of the Best Picture nominations in the next few days. I actually saw them all this year, so I'm going to go ahead and get myself a cookie and be right back. Ah, that's better. Girl Scout cookies truly are the bomb.

127 Hours, or as you may know it, that movie where James Franco cuts his arm off, starts out really annoyingly. It's directed by Danny Boyle, who also directed Slumdog Millionaire which I didn't like. Don't tell anybody. Them's apparently fighting words to a lot of people, I have found. But he seems to have a love for a really hyper, pulsating, kind of bad 80s music video vibe, and that's sort of how he starts this movie. And the character that Franco plays...lets just say that about 10 minutes in I turned to Matt and said, "If they're trying to make him so insufferable that I will relish seeing him have to chop off his own arm, then mission accomplished."

It sounds like I didn't like it, doesn't it? Not true! I did like it ! In fact, when I rank all the Best Picture nominations from this year in my head, which I actually do more often than I care to admit, many times this movie comes out number two, right behind that gay fantasia Black Swan, which had me at "creepy movie about anorexic ballerinas". After you get past the first 10 or 15 minutes of annoyance, you know, once the Franco settles down and gets all wedged into a chasm, it gets really compelling. It's one of those movies where once it's over you feel like you lived through the experience yourself, and you come out of the theater slightly dazed and so damn glad that that nice young couple saw you wandering armless around the Utah desert and called for help for you. And let me just add, that as much as I am against Franco and Hathaway as Oscar hosts, and think they will be pretentious and humorless time sucks that aren't in any way ready for this kind of heady responsibility (yes, I've seen the ads. No, I don't think they're funny) one Mr. James Franco can act his face off, and he does that in this movie. That's a good thing too, because you have to spend the vast majority of this movie just staring at his face, so it's best that it's a handsome and a talented one. Still doesn't mean he should host the Oscars, though. Just that he maybe should win Best Actor, but that isn't going to happen.

Like I say, maybe my second favorite of the Best Picture nominations. Too bad it came and went so quickly from the theaters, because i do think it'll lose something on DVD. Oh, and that arm cutting scene isn't really all that gross, and I'm kind of squeamish about that kind of shiz. It also takes up maybe 10 minutes of the movie, max.