TRAVIS BYRAM'S MOVIE REVIEWS

Remember #OscarsSoWhite? Besides future directing winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu, there wasn't a single person of color in the major nominees of last year's Academy Awards. Idris Elba, the deserving winner of the Best Supporting Actor SAG, wasn't even nominated. So this year's Academy Awards have a lot of recovery to do, especially in the wake of the horrific racial violence and tensions that have plagued America and rocked the media all of 2016. So (unless the predominantly white male Academy is really set on alienating viewers) expect to see a lot more color amidst the nominees, with acclaimed films like Loving , Moonlight  and Fences all predicting to steal Best Picture nominee slots. Over my Thanksgiving break, I was thankful to have watched the former two of those movies, both in part dealing with the African-American experience. I'll start with Loving , because it literally hits close to home, in the Old Dominion! Three years ago I was lucky enough to attend t...

Here's the irony I had walking into Baz Lurhmann's "The Great Gatsby:" most people who I've talked to refer to "Gatsby" as that book that they had to read in their high school English class.  As someone who's currently enrolled in a high school English class...I've never read "The Great Gatsby," mostly because I'd assumed we'd have gotten to it by now, but...nope.  We did however watch half of the 1974 Jack Clayton version starring Robert Redford, which was, to say the least, romantic but dry.  I was hoping this version wouldn't share these undesirable qualities. Luhrmann, the real star of the film Wow, is it good to be right. Luhrmann's "Gatsby," which was moved from December 2012 to now for some reason, is a gorgeous film with enormous scope and, dare I say, brave decisions.  All my peers had raved about the "Gatsby" adaptation, but then again they did the same for "Iron Man 3," and ...

"Warrior" is a unique sports movie that actually doesn't make the same mistake so many others make of focusing on the sport instead of the players.  A generic sports movie, say "Gridiron Gang" lacked heart, and what it suffered in performances, it surpassed in emotional speeches.  "Warrior" features a sport so brutal, it's hard to picture any of its players being anything but insane. The premise of "Warrior" starts out believable...but in all fairness, it turns out extremely unlikely.  Paddy, (played so well by Nick Nolte in this movie he gets his own paragraph in this review) is an ex-alcoholic who wants to reconnect with his sons.  That plot point right there has sappy potential.  But the film goes another way.  Instead of being glad his dad wants to be back in his life, Tommy (Tom Hardy, who gives a ferocious performance that seems to have gone unnoticed because of Nolte's tour de force work here) rejects his old man, and in the ...