One Category at a Time: Cinematography

Twenty-two business days to go until the Oscars; Essentially New Year's Eve for film lovers and award obsessives, both camps into which I fall. How will I ever pass the time?

Why, by continuing my annual tradition of analyzing the various Oscar races in 'One Category at a Time', the very first article series I began back in 2008 when this was just a baby blog. I suppose six years old still seems kinda babyish, but relative to the age of the Internet, I guess that makes this site now more of a disrespectful teenager that wishes it could be more like the grownup websites. That's an appropriate description, I think.

Anyway, back to this year's series, which I will be kicking off (as I did last year) with my favourite category Best Cinematography. This year's race feels eerily similar to last year's, with one inarguable frontrunner soaring well above its competition... and it's the same person too!

Review - Moonrise Kingdom

An AWOL Khaki Scout and his sweetheart commit probably the most adorable elopement ever put on screen in Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, the latest in the auteur's ever-growing portfolio of exacting comedies, wherein subdued youthful angst and emotional exploration manifest themselves in a case of love on the run, sending shock waves through the cozily contained island community of New Penzance.

The two absconders in question are 12-year-olds Sam and Suzy, exquisitely played by newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward with a precocious, self-aware deadpan intended to serve Anderson and cowriter Roman Coppola's deliberately eccentric dialogue. He, an orphan who can't seem to make friends even among his fellow Khaki Scouts as they're so called (not to be confused with Baden-Powell's boys), and she, frustrated and smothered by a family composed of three banal brothers and lawyer parents who parley in legal jargon without a trace of irony or affection, have in common that they're both social outsiders, and both may be, as others perceive them to be, “emotionally disturbed” – but really, who wasn't at that age? Perhaps emotionally curious is a better way of summing it up, after a chance meeting at a church pageant followed by an intimate pen pal correspondence prompts them one summer to runaway together, certain that whatever existence they forge for themselves in the coastal wilderness of their island home will be happier than the ones they currently lead.