TRAVIS BYRAM'S MOVIE REVIEWS

Reading the reviews of Richard Linklater's Boyhood , you just start to get emotional simply getting the feel of what the movie is going to be about. For a while it had a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, a feat movies like The Godfather  have only accomplished on the site. There's no negative backlash yet, nothing that could hurt the chances of everyone on board. Boyhood  has all the elements of a movie that will win Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards. Look at the facts: every single Best Picture nominee last year was released from October on, kicking off with the special effects extravaganza Gravity . A movie hasn't won Best Picture since 2009's The Hurt Locker , which got an extremely low-key limited release in the summer. I remember wanting to see it, then seeing it explode into pop culture once the Golden Globe nominations weren't released. The bottom line: you have to have your movie released later for the voters to remember you. But Boyhood  seems...

The age-old question concerning movies and books arose as I was about to enter the cinema to see "Life of Pi 3D..." should I have read the book after the movie (books are 99% of the time better)?  By pure chance I had picked up "Life of Pi," a thick, small novel in my school's library based on the cover alone, of a small foreign child with a tiger in a tiny boat, both looking down at the sea.  Of course with "Pi" you're expecting some math genius, "A Beautiful Mind" type-deal, but then I read the first few chapters that night.  The novel was written in the form of a series of flashbacks, presented as one big story Piscine (Pi) Patel tells a couple of Chinese investigators.  While it was a mammoth of  a thing to get through, it was enchantingly rewarding, and was one of the most interesting books I've read in a long time. "Life of Pi" opens up quietly in a zoo, where Pi and his family make a living.  Pi is so thoroughly in ...

So many moves have come out between when I did my review for The Help !  I saw the brutal, fantastic Warrior, the excellently well-done perfectly cast Moneyball  & the less-than-satisfactory In Time .  I can honestly tell you that 2 out of those 3 will mostly likely be featured in the Academy's latest gaggle of nominations.  They've been having controversy lately, but ultimately I'm happy with the change from Eddie Murphy to the always reliable Billy Crystal.  One of the monkeys from Rise of the Planet of the Apes  could do a better job than the Franco/Hathaway disaster that was the 2010 Oscars. So without further ado here are my predictions for the best picture nominees of 2011.  Recent buzz has definitely changed my decisions:  * indicates my choice for Best Picture. BEST PICTURE NOMINEES (10): Moneyball (Perfect casting.  I know for sure Pitt will at least get a nod.) The Descendants (It's gotten tons of buzz, but it m...